Written in a style that is accessible to a wide audience, The Fractal Geometry of Nature inspired popular interest in this emerging field. Mandelbrot's unique style, and rich illustrations will inspire readers of all backgrounds.

Written in a style that is accessible to a wide audience, The Fractal Geometry of Nature inspired popular interest in this emerging field. Mandelbrot's unique style, and rich illustrations will inspire readers of all backgrounds.

Three classic fractals, tamed. Galaxies and eddies. Scaling fractals. Nonscaling fractals. Self-mapping fractals. Randomness. Stratified random fractals. Fractional brown fractals. A book-within-the-book, in color. Random tremas; texture. Miscellany. Of men and ideas.

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history’s greatest mathematicians to ask how—if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind—it can so perfectly explain the physical world. Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that—mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented or discovered? If, as Einstein insisted, mathematics is “a product of human thought that is independent of experience,” how can it so accurately describe and even predict the world around us? Physicist and author Mario Livio brilliantly explores mathematical ideas from Pythagoras to the present day as he shows us how intriguing questions and ingenious answers have led to ever deeper insights into our world. This fascinating book will interest anyone curious about the human mind, the scientific world, and the relationship between them.

From the reviews: "In the world of mathematics, the 1980's might well be described as the "decade of the fractal". Starting with Benoit Mandelbrot's remarkable text The Fractal Geometry of Nature, there has been a deluge of books, articles and television programmes about the beautiful mathematical objects, drawn by computers using recursive or iterative algorithms, which Mandelbrot christened fractals. Gerald Edgar's book is a significant addition to this deluge. Based on a course given to talented high- school students at Ohio University in 1988, it is, in fact, an advanced undergraduate textbook about the mathematics of fractal geometry, treating such topics as metric spaces, measure theory, dimension theory, and even some algebraic topology. However, the book also contains many good illustrations of fractals (including 16 color plates), together with Logo programs which were used to generate them. ... Here then, at last, is an answer to the question on the lips of so many: 'What exactly is a fractal?' I do not expect many of this book's readers to achieve a mature understanding of this answer to the question, but anyone interested in finding out about the mathematics of fractal geometry could not choose a better place to start looking." #Mathematics Teaching#1

Discover the Hidden Mathematics of Modern Geometry Fractals, the never-ending geometric-mathematical patterns existing throughout nature, are revealed in the shapes of continents, galaxies, snowflakes, and grains of sand. In this fascinating and seminal volume, renowned pioneering-mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot explains his work on fractal geometry, mathematically translating the description of these complex shapes of nature. Until Mandelbrot developed the concept of fractal geometry in the 1960s and 70s, most mathematicians believed these irregular shapes were too fragmented and amorphous to be described mathematically. Mandelbrot's revolutionary concept brought order to a variety of seemingly unsolvable problems in physics, biology, and financial markets. Broad in application, this groundbreaking work will inform not just mathematicians, but anyone that appreciates the natural elegance of patterns made manifest. Featuring illustrations of mathematically defined shapes, Mandelbrot describes how geometric patterns relate to every aspect of the physical world around us.

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