The oak in the original Palo Alto Medical Foundation's courtyard.
A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured."
A fractal often has the following features:
- It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
- It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
- It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
- It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
- It has a simple and recursive definition.
Cargado por jay_kilifi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
