''The Fractal Geometry of Nature'' is a 1982 book by the Franco-American
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
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Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of p ...
.
Overview
''The Fractal Geometry of Nature'' is a revised and enlarged version of his 1977 book entitled ''Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension'', which in turn was a revised, enlarged, and translated version of his 1975 French book, ''Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension''. ''
American Scientist
__NOTOC__
''American Scientist'' (informally abbreviated ''AmSci'') is an American bimonthly science and technology magazine published since 1913 by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. In the beginning of 2000s the headquarters was in Ne ...
'' put the book in its one hundred books of 20th century science.
As technology has improved, mathematically accurate, computer-drawn
fractals
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illus ...
have become more detailed. Early drawings were low-resolution black and white; later drawings were higher resolution and in color. Many examples were created by programmers working with Mandelbrot, primarily at
IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...
. These visualizations have added to persuasiveness of the books and their impact on the scientific community.
See also
*
Chaos theory
Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fractal Geometry of Nature, The
1982 non-fiction books
Mathematics books
Fractals