What Does Fractal Mean?
Fractals are complex patterns that are self-similar, and therefore exhibit similar patterns at every scale. Fractals can be patterns or shapes that are non-regular and differ from traditional geometric shapes, but occur very commonly in nature, such as clouds, mountains, trees and snowflakes. The most well-known illustration of fractals is the Mandelbrot set, which when magnified simply shows repetitions of the same pattern, making it hard to determine the level of magnification due to the recurring patterns.
Techopedia Explains Fractal
Fractal geometry is considered a special field in mathematics simply because fractals have very different mathematical equations than regular geometry. The phenomena has been studied for hundreds of years, but fractals have largely been ignored as “mathematical monsters” because of unfamiliarity, being very different from established geometry. The mathematics behind fractals started in the 17th century when mathematician Gottfried Leibniz started studying recursive self-similarity and used the term “fractional exponents” to describe them, but it was not until 1872 that Karl Weierstrass presented the first definition of a function with a graph that can be considered a fractal by today’s definition.
