Abstract
Fractals are more than just stunning visual effects – they open up new ways to model nature and allow us to quantify terms like ‘irregular’, ‘rough’ and ‘complicated’, writes mathematician Ian Stewart. His chapter does a service to the non-specialist reader in giving a largely non-technical introduction to fractal geometry in the context of mathematical traditions and its commercial applications. Stewart shows both how concepts like fractal dimension have a lengthy prehistory and also how Mandelbrot brought to the subject a systematic treatment, uniting theory and application. Mandelbrot’s most important contribution to fractal geometry, Stewart suggests, ‘was the realization that there was a subject’.
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Stewart, I. (2010). The Nature of Fractal Geometry. In: Lesmoir-Gordon, N. (eds) The Colours of Infinity. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-486-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-486-9_1
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