What the Hell are Fractals?
Hold your breath for a moment. They’re basically graphs which, however much you zoom in, will always have a complex pattern. A curve for example will turn into a straight line if you zoom in enough but these things will stay curvy. You can also divide a fractal into lots of parts and each of these will look roughly like the whole thing. Don’t worry if you’re lost already – I asked a physics PhD student to explain these things to me and when I left him I had to spend a week eating ice cream and watching cartoons before my brain recovered (or was that just because I am a lazy student?). Perhaps the most important thing about fractals is that if you type “fractals” into the image search engine in Google you get lots of pretty pictures. The fact that we find these pictures pretty has been studied by scientists, who say that our brains find the symmetry of them pleasing. In my opinion it’s just an excuse for the scientists to spend all day staring at them. Where did fractals come from? The
