Ever wonder what causes the leaves to change color in the fall? Or how you can time claps of thunder to calculate your distance to a nearby storm? Believe it or not, math can help you to investigate these and other natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and seasonal changes. In the collection of activities below, you'll also learn how you can use periodic trigonometric curves to represent cyclical patterns in nature. With a little help from the
mathematics, you'll be able to apply basic sine and tangent curves to such things as the beating of your heart, phases of the moon, and the path of the sun across the sky.
A fractal is a mathematical object that is self-similar, where each part resembles to the whole. Most fractals are generated by a relatively simple equation where the
are fed back into the equation until it grows larger than a certain boundary. Some fractals are just a graph of an equation using complex numbers. The mathematicians kept on asking themselves about some paradoxes, since 100 years ago. Thus, Sierpinski, a Polish mathematician, created some fractals, without knowing their meaning: The Curve, The Triangle and The Carpet. In the same time, in Sweden, Herge Von Koch invented “The Snowflakes’ Curve” or “Coast Line”.
Fractals were not discovered in a single instant, but knowledge of them grew quickly in the computer age. The first real fractal were discovered by a French mathematician named Gaston Julia. In his time there were no computers, so serious study of fractal objects was not practical at all.
In March 1980 the French mathematician Mandelbrot saw appearing on his computer screen something that would change his life completely. Many compare his discovery to Newton's discovery of the universal laws of mechanics. This discovery introduced a completely new field in Mathematics: Fractal Geometry. The application of fractal geometry is a subject of study in many scientific fields: medical science, meteorology, Biology and telecommunication benefit from this new science.
1 comment:
On the topic of fractals, I wonder how much of it exists beyond the physical, and in the realm of emotions. I'm not talking about anything metaphysical -- just normal human interaction and behavior.
I wrote a blog post about it -- maybe you'd like to comment.
Grinding Fractal Gears
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