How are fractals created?
Why create fractals? What is a fractal? Before diving right in to a technical definition of a fractal I am going to start off with some common, non-mathematical ideas of a fractal. The most famous analogy used to help understand fractals is the length of a given coastline, say Florida’s. At first thought this seems to be an easy question, at least it should be easy enough to look up. In front of me I have a small map of Florida and it looks as if I measure with a ruler, the length of Florida’s coast comes out to about 1097 miles. But looking the encyclopedia I see that the length of the coastline is 1350 miles. How did I get almost 250 miles off? First off, I was using a two inch square map of Florida and a small ruler. My error was around one eighth of an inch. I wasn’t worried about getting into all of the little coves and bays that line the coast of Florida. The mapmaker that figured out the length of the coast must have been more accurate (I bet he didn’t use a ruler). It is import
