“Fractal geometry was essentially discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot in the nineteen sixties and seventies, based partially on the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincare, and Helge von Koch. Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in 1975 in his foundational book, revised and published in English first in 1977 as Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, and then further revised and expanded in 1982 as The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In his book, Mandelbrot elucidates the mathematical sets that produce fractals along with a conceptual framework for their understanding, which demonstrate that many objects and processes found in both nature and human culture develop self-similarly, or through the closely related concept of self-affinity, which he describes as “the resemblance between the parts and the whole.” That is, coastlines, fern leaves, stock markets, turbulence, and many other complex processes and entities all recursively repeat similar structural patterns across different scales of magnitude, so that one part of the leaf magnified looks very much like the larger leaf, or the distribution of stars in one galaxy looks very much like the distribution of many galaxies in a galactic cluster.”

Fractal geometry was essentially discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot in the nineteen sixties and seventies, based partially on the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincare, and Helge von Koch. Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in 1975 in his foundational book, revised and published in English first in 1977 as Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension, […]

via The Fractal Quality of Process — The Dynamics of Transformation