Hannah Hecht's Blog

For me, Hunting the Hidden Dimension was nothing short of mind-blowing. Not being a mathematically-minded person, I fully expected to watch three or four minutes of this documentary and then promptly fall asleep or become hopelessly lost in calculations. Instead, I was completely entranced by this stunning display of mathematics in nature and art from beginning to end. It is amazing to think that everything in nature can be condensed down to one infinite fractal.

In the past, I found it incredibly hard to find beauty in math. Instead, I would get trapped in seemingly endless and pointless calculations, only to find out that I had mixed up a negative or positive sign in the first step. As it turns out, math is so much more than the sum of calculations.

Fractals, in my newfound opinion, are one of the most beautiful forms of math in nature. It is amazing that the proportion of long to short branches on a tree is the same as the proportion of tall to short trees in that same forest. Evolution has come up with the same solution to problems over and over and over: fractals and repeating patterns. That is the true beauty of nature: order. As it turns out, one can find order in even the most disorderly things.