Fractal as Pattern-teacher
What are your favorite fractals? For me, simply to list my favorite fractals together, knowing they all share something in common, is a great pleasure… Lightening and neural networks both follow fractal patterns. Then there is the vascular system branching, tissues, clouds, trabecular branching patterns within bone structure, distribution of arthropod body lengths, distribution of human digit to finger to hand to arm lengths, mammographic parenchymal pattern (revealiing risk for breast cancer), snowflakes, seashells, lungs, cracks, spiral arms of galaxies, the folds of the brain and the encoding of thoughts, facial dimensions, tree and leaf branching, the coastline of Britain, growth rates of plants, structure of mountain ranges, DNA folding, quarks, atoms, and the fingers and arms of the sun.
Jhane Barnes is a textile artist, using fractals to design fabric patterns:
From Jackson Pollock to lightning to Russian nesting dolls, I’m looking for connections there, too. What are your observations? What strikes you about them? If you find them beautiful, what makes them so?
Laura Maaske, January 7, 2011 Medical ANimator and Illustrator Medical Illustration & Design [email protected] http://www.medimagery.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramaaske http://twitter.com/#!/Medimagery http://www.facebook.com/Medimagery http://www.facebook.com/laura.maaske http://medillsb.com/ArtistPortfolioThumbs.aspx?AID=4115
The pipes of the wastewater collection system are the only infrastructure system that worked as I thought they would — straightforward, trunk-and-branch fractal, from drain to pipe to bigger pipe to bigger pipe to great big main to treatment plant. Everything else — including water! including electricity! — worked a lot more like loops. Though now that I think about it, maybe … cable?
Cool stuff here. Great work.
I admire your writing, Scott, and I will frequently return to your Website: http://www.scotthuler.com/. The next weeks will find me out with my camera and sketchpad, looking to capture these human-designed fractals you mention.
Laura, in considering “favorite fractals,” my mind is taken back to summer walks in the parks of Franklin, and one taken while on Washington Island in Door County, Wisconsin.
At a good distance from me, I hear a familiar and loved sound, the voice of a certain species of the poplar tree. These trees stand tall, with silver trunks and medium size oval leaves, silver on the underside and emerald on the front. When prompted by the wind, these leaves dance, shimmering in the sunlight, and lift their voices in unison. I never fail to understand their message: the Joy of Life.
Was that in Autumn, Tom? Or another season? When I think of trees “speaking” with a sound of any kind, it’s an event that takes me by surprise in Autumn. The first winds rustling their leaves strike me as an act of engaged conversation. Right now, with the January winter silence, the naked skeletons of trees seem to stand as if in dominance over the landscape, yet master orators there, as if theirs is the only wisdom of the land that doesn’t die with seasons. Trees reveal fractals in many ways.
I’m really not a mathematical fractal type, I like the way they look. I certainly don’t understand the math of fractals…. But they have a beauty that is true, pure natural grace, eloquent natural non symmetrical organized chaos (something like that)…
You may have heard of the mandelbrodt set (I think I have that right). There was a special on PBS 10 or so years ago, I recorded it in Color, played it over and over, an infinite, never repeating, ever expanding shape, presented by Dr. Mandelbrodt a fractal set, mathematical, simple yet very profound, maybe you can explain it : )
Thank you Harold. I did not see this PBS show. Was the video zooming more and more deeply into a series of circles?
Being a composer, I sometimes think of a symphonic score as being an ever-growing fractal network, each note grouping or motif possessing the potential to branch off in another direction in full development… the possibilities are endless, but finite only in the endurance of the composer!
Beautiful Stuart. I’ve heard of music being composed specifically to resemble the fractal from. But I haven’t heard the degree to which the symphonic form traditionally reflects that form. Intuitively, Beethoven comes to mind as having a trunk and branching feeling within those compositions.
By the way, I’m Stuart Balcomb, Tim’s Girvin’s friend. Vail is my middle name, which I use as my publisher name for TheScreamOnline. I wear many hats!
Thank you Stuart. Thank you for vising my site. I enjoyed your ideas about morphic fields. And I wish you well with your book.
Please let me know when you blog about Morphic Fields. I attended a day-long conference by Sheldrake in Seattle. An amazing day!
Absolutely Stuart! Many thanks!