Fractals

Fractals were discovered in 1975 by a Polish man by the name of Benoît Mandelbrot, and when I say discovered I mean finally put into words. Benoît Mandelbrot defined a fractal as a geometric shape that when split into smaller parts, those parts would be exact replicas of the first shape. The word fractal comes from the Latin word fractus which means "broken" or "fractured". The idea of fractals had been around for a very long time before Benoît Mandelbrot, but he was the first to actually realize how amazing they were. Mandelbrot's first started researching how fractals can be found in nature. His first report was about how long the coast of Britain actually was. Before Benoît Mandelbrot, many mathematicians and philosophers had studied the idea of recursive self-similarity. But it wasn't until Mandelbrot solidified hundreds of years of thought and mathematical development and created the term fractal. After Mandelbrot, in 1980, an American by the name of Loren Carpenter created a computer program that illustrated fractal landscapes.