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What are the characteristics of all fractals?

2007-11-26 11:45:09 · 2 answers · asked by ♥TheBeatlesBiggestFan♥ 5 in Science & Mathematics Mathematics

2 answers

fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,"[1] a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured".

A fractal often has the following features:

It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
It has a simple and recursive definition.[2]
Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that approximate fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, and snow flakes. However, not all self-similar objects are fractals—for example, the real line (a straight Euclidean line) is formally self-similar but fails to have other fractal characteristics.

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fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales. The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure at all scales, but the same "type" of structures must appear on all scales. A plot of the quantity on a log-log graph versus scale then gives a straight line, whose slope is said to be the fractal dimension. The prototypical example for a fractal is the length of a coastline measured with different length rulers. The shorter the ruler, the longer the length measured, a paradox known as the coastline paradox.
>> from wolfram mathworld
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html

2007-11-26 11:49:50 · answer #1 · answered by Σ|╧±┼┼┘ 3 · 1 0

They are infinite, and constantly reapeat. They could look pretty cool sumtimes

2007-11-26 11:48:45 · answer #2 · answered by Plain Silly 4 · 0 1

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