Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Summary:

This video discussed the importance of fractals (a jagged repeating form) in our everyday lives. You may have never heard of a fractal before watching this video but they are something that is all around us; it is in nature, math, art, science, and even us. This video goes on to explain how Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, came about discovering them. A fractal is simply something that keeps repeating itself. For instance, with the whole triangle snowflake scenario, if you have an equilateral triangle and you add another equilateral triangle to each side, you should be able to continue forever and it will look the same. Also, if you take a segment of a whole, the segment will resemble the whole piece. At the end of the film, some scientists were experimenting to see if you could take one tree and figure out a whole forest by that one tree. After their experimenting, they found that there hypothesis was correct and you could figure out the structure of a forest by looking at an individual tree.

Analysis/Evaluation:

I found this video very entertaining and eye opening. Last year in my Calculus class, my teacher opened the door a little about fractals by showing us the snowflake and the black circle like thing that Mandelbrot created. I found it very interesting that a healthy human heartbeat is considered a fractal. The fact that something like that can be determined by mathematics is just so astonishing. This video really opened your eyes to what math can be used for. I also thought it was neat how we use fractals today in our cellphones; this alone just shows how important fractals are and how far they can go. Who knows what we will be using fractals for in the next 100 years. I found the whole idea of fractals beautiful because they relate so much to nature and art that it is almost impossible not to see something beautiful out of that. Overall I thought this video was a very good informative video and kept me wondering what all a fractal is found in.