Benoit Mandelbrot: The Father Of Fractals In Mathematics And Computer Science

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CHAPTER 1 :
INTRODUCTION
Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010), scientist and mathematician who also worked at IBM, is known as the father of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot coined the word fractal in the late 1970s. Before the invention of computers, Fractals have come up as an important question. Fractal is a set, which is self–similar under magnification.[27] It is, however, remarked that many of the fractals and their similes go back to traditional mathematics and mathematicians of the past like George Cantor(1872), Giuseppe Peano(1890), David Hilbert(1891), HelgeVon Koch(1904), Waclaw Sierpinski(1916), Gaston Julia (1918), Felix Hausdorff (1919) and others.
“… that they are representations of relatively simple yet extremely powerful mathematical concepts, concepts that are well on the way to explaining and predicting behavior of many dynamical of nonlinear systems such as regulation of heartbeats, fluid turbulence, population growth, propagation of genes and weather cycles, to name just a few”.
Fractal Theory is an exciting branch of applicable Mathematics and Computer Science. There are many kind of fractals and …show more content…

Fractals essentially have the property of ‘Self-Similarity’ i.e. a fractal is a never ending pattern that repeats itself at different scales either strictly or statistically. According to Srinivas Jampala, strictly self-similar fractals do not change their shape significantly when viewed under a microscope of arbitrary magnifying power. Whereas for statistically self-similar fractals, when a small part of it is magnified results into a fractal. This type of fractal is apparently but not exactly similar to the original fractal itself.[23] Due to this property, zooming-in or zooming-out several number of times in a fractal image would not make much difference in its appearance. Following figure shows the steps to generate snowflake curve and Sierpinski triangle with the help of fractal

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