SCIENCE NEWS - ifty years ago, “fractal” was born.
In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to describe a family of rough, fragmented shapes that fall outside the boundaries of conventional geometry. Mathematicians had been describing these types of shapes since the late 19th century. But by giving them a name — derived from fractus, Latin for “broken” — Mandelbrot gave fractals value. He introduced a way to measure and analyze them. With a name, he recognized order in complexity.
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Fractal-like structures even appear in the body. “If you don’t have a fractal network of blood vessels, we would probably die every second, every time our heart beats, because it’s a very powerful pump,” says Michel Lapidus, a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside and editor in chief of the Journal of Fractal Geometry. A branching structure, he says, both slows the flow and gets the blood where it needs to go. Fractal-like forms also appear in cancer cells and the lungs.