can’t see the forest

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I love me some recursion, folks. Hopefully you’ll enjoy these fractal animations I’ve gleaned and compiled from YouTube. The music is, in my humble opinion, much more forgettable than the video in some instances—but your ears are not mine, so perhaps you’ll hear something I don’t. As for the graphics, though: get out your Mandelbrot Brand spectacles. Enjoy the turbulence while it lasts.

Far more than mere shimmering pretties, fractals are geometric patterns which have fine structure at arbitrarily small scales such that the structure is at least approximately recursive to the shape of the whole. Some examples of naturally occurring fractals include snowflakes, lightning bolts, tree branches, fern leaves [ed. okay, fern fronds]—in fact, fractals seem to be integral to the geometric expression of natural forms in any direction you happen to be looking (the link is to the Wikipedia article with excellent illustrations and explanations). The principle of recursion is fundamental to number theory and has been gaining the attention of mathematicians and cosmologists at least since the days of Leibniz, and increasingly so since the exploits of Benoit Mandelbrot and in this age of all things electro-graphical.