A modernnotes Fractal mathematical theory that radically departs from traditional EUCLIDEAN G fractal geometry describes objects that

are self-similar, or scale symmetric. Th EOMETRY is means that when such objects are magnified, their parts are seen to bear an e xact resemblance to the whole, the likeness continuing with the parts of the par ts and so on to infinity. Fractals, as these shapes are called, also must be de void of translational symmetry--that is, the smoothness associated with Euclidea n lines, planes, and spheres. Instead a rough, jagged quality is maintained at everynature The scale of at fractals which an is object reflected can bein examined. the word itself, coined by mathematician B enoit B. Mandelbrot from the Latin verb frangere, "to break," and the related ad jective The simplest fractus, fractal "irregular is theand Cantor fragmented." bar (named after the 19th- century German math ematician Georg CANTOR). One may be constructed by dividing a line in 3 parts a nd removing the middle part. The procedure is repeated indefinitely, first on t he 2 remaining parts, then on on 4 parts produced by that operation, and so on, until the object has an infinitely large number of parts each of which is infini tely small. Fractals are not relegated exclusively to the realm of mathematics. If the defin ition is broadened a bit, such objects can be found virtually everywhere in the natural world. The difference is that "natural" fractals are randomly, statistic ally, or stochastically rather than exactly scale symmetric. The rough shape re vealed at one length scale bears only an approximate resemblance to that at anot her, but the length scale being used is not apparent just by looking at the shap e. Moreover, there are both upper and lower limits to the size range over which the fractals in nature are indeed fractal. Above and below that range, the sha pes are either rough (but not self-similar) or smooth--in other words, conventio nally Euclidean. Whether natural or mathematical, all fractals have particular fractal dimensions. These are not the same as the familiar Euclidean dimensions, measured in disc rete whole integers--1, 2, or 3--but a different kind of quantity. Usually noni nteger, a fractal dimension indicates the extent to which the fractal object fil ls natural A the Euclidean fractal dimension of fractal in dimension which it is 2.8, embedded. for example, would be a sponge-like s hape nearly 3-dimensional in appearance. A natural fractal of fractal dimension The Background 2.2 roots would of be fractal a much smoother geometryobject can bethat traced just tomisses the late being 19th flat. century, when mathem aticians started Fractional dimensions to challenge were not Euclid's discussed principles. until 1919, however, when the German mat hematician Felix Hausdorff put forward the idea in connection with the small-sca le structure of mathematical shapes. As completed by the Russian mathematician A. S. Besicovitch, Hausdorff's dimensionality was a forerunner of fractal dimens ionality. Other mathematicians of the time, however, considered such strange sha pes asattitude This "pathologies" persisted thatuntil had no the significance. mid-20th century and the work of Mandelbrot, a Polish-born French mathematician who moved to the United States in 1958. His 19 61 study of similarities in large- and small-scale fluctuations of the stock mar ket was followed by work on phenomena involving nonstandard scaling, including t he turbulent motion of fluids and the distribution of galaxies in the universe. A 1967 paper on the length of the English coast showed that irregular shoreline s are fractals whose lengths increase with increasing degree of measurable detai l. By 1975, Mandelbrot had developed a theory of fractals, and publications by him and others made fractal geometry accessible to a wider audience. The subjec t began to gain Mandelbrot later importance also investigated in the sciences. another fractal terrain, that of shapes distor ted in some way from one length to another. These fractals are now called nonli near, since the relationships between their parts is subject to change. They re tain some degree of self-similarity, but it is a local rather than global charac teristic in them. The general definition of the word fractal may thus need furt her refinement, to indicate more precisely which shapes should be included and w hich most The excluded intriguing by the of term. the nonlinear fractals thus far has been the mathematical set named after Mandelbrot by the American mathematicians John Hubbard and Adrie n Douady. The more the set is magnified, the more its unpredictability increase s, until unpredictability comes to dominate the bud-like shape that is the set's major element of stability. The set has become the source of stunning color CO MPUTER GRAPHICS images. It is also important in mathematics because of its centr ality to dynamical system theory. An entire Mandelbrot set is actually a catalo g of dynamical mathematical objects--that is, objects generated through an itera tive process called Julia sets. These derive from the work done by a French mat hematician, Gaston Julia, on the iteration of nonlinear transformations in a com

Scientists plex Impact plane. on the have Sciences begun to investigate the fractal character of a wide range of phe nomena. Researchers are interested in doing so for the practical reason that be havior on a fractal shape may differ markedly from that on a Euclidean shape. P hysics is by far the discipline most affected by fractal geometry. In condensed -matter, or solid-state physics, for example, the so-called "percolation cluster " model used to describe critical phenomena involved in phase transitions and in mixture of atoms with opposing properties is clearly fractal. This has implica tions, as well, for a host of attributes, including electrical conductivity. Th e percolation cluster model may also apply to the atomic structure of glasses, g els, and other amorphous materials, and their fractal nature may give them uniqu e heat-transport Another major area properties of condensed-matter that could be physics exploited to invoke technologically. the concept of self-simi larity is that of kinetic growth, in which particles are gradually added to a st ructure in such a way that once they stick, they neither come off nor rearrange themselves. In the case of the simplest model of kinetic growth, the most impor tant physical phenomenon to which it applies appears to be the fingering of a le ss-viscous fluid (water) through a more viscous fluid (oil) lodged in a porous s ubstance (limestone and other kinds of rock). A more complex model explains the Mathematical growth of colloidal physics, agglomerates. for its part, has a particular interest in nonlinear fracta ls. When dynamical systems--those that change their behavior over time--become chaotic, or totally unpredictable, physicists describe the route they take with such fractals . Called strange attractors, these objects are not real physical entities but abstractions that exist in "phase space," an expanse with as many d imensions One pointas inphysicists phase space need represents to describe a single dynamical measurement physical ofbehavior. the state of a dynami cal system as it evolves over time. When all such points are connected, they fo rm a trajectory that lies on the surface of a strange attractor. Most physicist s who study chaos do so with carefully controlled laboratory setups of turbulent fluid flow. Individual strange attractors have been identified for different k inds of turbulent fluid flow, suggesting the existence of numerous routes to cha Although not concerned with fractals to the same extent as physics, other science os. s have discovered them. In biology, the anomolous thermal relaxation rate of ir on-containing proteins has been explained as resulting from the fractal shape of the linear polymer chain that comprises all proteins. The distribution pattern of atoms on the protein surface, a different aspect of protein structure, also appears Many more to fractals be fractal. have been detected in geology, including both random exterior surfaces--ragged mountains and valleys--and interior fractal surfaces in the bri ttle crust, such as California's famous San Andreas fault. Earthquake processes for small tremors--those of magnitude 6 or less--appear to be fractal in time a s well as space, since these quakes occur in self-similar clusters rather than a t regular intervals. Meteorology provides a different kind of space-time fractal the contour of the are a over which tropical rain falls is self-similar, and the amount of rain that fa lls varieson Finally, inthe a self-similar interface offashion scienceover and art, time.computer-graphics specialists, usin g a recursive splitting technique, have produced striking new fractal images of great statistical complexity. Landscapes made this way have been used as backgr ounds in many motion pictures; trees and other branching structures have been u sed inmore Still Fractal still geometry Fractals lifes which, and animations. like topology, includes structures that are non-Euclidea n, has On thebeen software applied side, in graphics Chaos Theory. programs employ a wide variety of special display ALGORITHMS, or internal data-processing procedures, to create realistic images. For example, FRACTAL algorithms produce random images that can reveal an infini te amount of texture and are ideal for illustrating mountains and oceans. Fuzzy sets, or algorithms based on statistical probabilities, are useful for generati ng images of fire, smoke, and other natural phenomena. An iterative algorithm c an reproduce the same image countless times, making tiny changes in each one. H idden-surface removal algorithms can erase lines and surfaces from unseen portio ns of an image, such Pseudocoloring, or "colorizing," as the underside can endow of a cube. a colorless image with a wide range of hues. Modeling some complicated images, such as a human face, is still difficu lt to achieve, Modern refinements due of to logical the complex procedure algorithms have long involve since shown that Euclid's work needs modification. The recently developed FRACTAL geometry, for example, requ ires a more abstract, general definition of dimension than Euclid's. Euclidean s tatements as "a point is that which has no part" and "a line is breadthless leng th" and they recognize that any logical system must contain some undefined terms

Chaos . chaos theory theory, a modern development in mathematics and science, provides a framewo rk for understanding irregular or erratic fluctuations in nature. Chaotic syste ms are found in many fields of science and engineering. Many bodies in the sola r system alone, for example, have already been determined to exhibit chaotic orb its, and evidence of chaotic behavior has also been found in the pulsations of v ariable stars. Evidence of chaos occurs in models and experiments describing co nvection and mixing in fluids, in wave motion, in oscillating chemical reactions , and in electrical currents in semiconductors. It is also found in the dynamic s of animal populations and of medical disorders such as heart arrhythmia and ep ileptic seizures. In addition, attempts are being made to apply chaotic dynamic s in the social sciences, such as the study of business cycles and the modeling of chaotic A arms races. system is defined as one that shows "sensitivity to initial conditions. " That is, any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter h ow small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the futur e behavior. For example, the motion of a dust particle floating on the surface of a pair of oscillating whirlpools can display chaotic behavior. The particle will move in well-defined circles around the centers of the whirlpools, alternat ing between the two in an irregular manner. An observer who wants to predict th e motion of this particle will have to measure its initial location. If the mea surement is not infinitely precise, however, the observer will instead obtain th e location of an imaginary particle very close by. The "sensitivity to initial conditions" mentioned above will cause the nearby imaginary particle to follow a path that diverges from the path of the real particle. This makes any long-ter m prediction of the trajectory of the real particle impossible. In other words, the system is chaotic. Its behavior can be predicted only if the initial condi tionspossibility The are known to ofan chaos infinite in a natural, degree ofor accuracy, deterministic, which is system impossible. was first envisag ed by the French mathematician Henri Poincare in the late 19th century, in his w ork on planetary orbits. For many decades thereafter, however, little interest was shown in such possibilities. The modern study of chaotic dynamics may be sa id to have begun in 1963, when American meteorologist Edward Lorenz demonstrated that a simple, deterministic model of thermal convection in the Earth's atmosph ere showed sensitivity to initial conditions--or, in current terms, that it was a chaotic system. Following this observation, scientists and mathematicians began to study the prog ression from order to chaos in various systems, as the parameters of the systems were varied. In 1971 a Belgian physicist, David Ruelle, and a Dutch mathematic ian, Floris Takens, together predicted that the transition to chaotic turbulence in a moving fluid would take place at a well-defined critical value of the flui d's velocity (or some other important factor controlling the fluid's behavior). They predicted that this transition to turbulence would occur after the system had developed oscillations with at least three distinct frequencies. Experiment s with rotating fluid flows conducted by American physicists Jerry Gollub and Ha rry Swinney Another American in thephysicist, mid-1970s Mitchell supportedFeigenbaum, these predictions. then predicted that at the criti cal point when an ordered system begins to break down into chaos, a consistent s equence of period-doubling transitions would be observed. This so-called "perio d-doubling route to chaos" was thereafter observed experimentally by various inv estigators, including the French physicist Albert Libchaber and his coworkers. Feigenbaum went on to calculate a numerical constant that governs the doubling p rocess (Feigenbaum's number) and showed that his results were applicable to a wi de range of chaotic systems. In fact, an infinite number of possible routes to chaos can be described, several of which are "universal," or broadly applicable, in the sense of obeying proportionality laws that do not depend on details of t he physical The term chaotic system. dynamics refers only to the evolution of a system in time. Chao tic systems, however, also often display spatial disorder--for example, in compl icated fluid flows. Incorporating spatial patterns into theories of chaotic dyna mics is an active area of current research. Ultimately, scientists and mathemat icians hope to extend theories of chaos to the regime of fully developed turbule nce, where complete disorder exists in both space and time. This effort is wide ly viewed as among the greatest challenges of modern physics