The term fractal (from the Latin fractus, meaning “broken”) was coined by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975. So if we want to start building computational designs with patterns beyond the simple shapes ellipse(), rect(), and line(), it’s time for us to learn about the concepts behind and techniques for simulating the geometry of nature: fractals. But what if I were to look further, and consider the trees that line the street, the leaves that hang off those trees, the lightning from last night’s thunderstorm, the cauliflower I ate for dinner, the blood vessels in my body, and the mountains and coastlines that cover land beyond New York City? Most of the stuff you find in nature cannot be described by the idealized geometrical forms of Euclidean geometry. And the plum I ate this morning is circular. For us nature coders, we have to ask the question: Can we describe our world with Euclidean geometry? The LCD screen I’m staring at right now sure looks like a rectangle.
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