What are Fractals?

About Fractal

• It is a never-ending pattern which is infinitely complex and self-similar across different scales.
• In essence, a fractal is a pattern that repeats forever, and every part of the fractal, regardless of how zoomed in or zoomed out you are, it looks very similar to the whole image.
• They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.
• Fractals are distinct from the simple figures of classical, or Euclidean, geometry—the square, the circle, the sphere, and so forth.
• Some of the more remarkable examples of such patterns include the design of human fingerprints, the stumps of trees, in the shells of snails, the system of human veins, the network of rivers as seen from high up, the splitting of veins in a plant leaf, the edges of a snowflake etc.
• They are capable of describing many irregularly shaped objects or spatially nonuniform phenomena in nature, such as coastlines and mountain ranges.
• Applications: Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as eroded coastlines or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation.

Highlight of the research

• They discovered a microbial enzyme—citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium—that spontaneously assembles into a pattern known as the Sierpinski triangle.

Sierpiński triangle is an infinitely repeating series of triangles made up of smaller triangles.

Q1: What are Cyanobacteria ?

These are a group of photosynthetic bacteria, some of which are nitrogen-fixing, that live either freely or in a symbiotic relationship with plants or lichen-forming fungi.

Source: Discovery of the first fractal molecule in nature