I saw an interesting video on fractals. It was produced by NOVA called Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension. Being for the general public, it, of course, didn't get too hard core with the mathematics, but it didn't completely back away from it each.Because of that, a few of the applications left one with some questions. Such a case was when someone in the video said, "Fractals are important in code breaking." Then they leave it there because to try to explain it would cause most people's heads to explode. In a lot of cases, to have to skip over the math is somewhat unsatisfying, but probably pretty much unavoidable.
Interesting to me was how Benoit Mandlebrot first got involved with applications of fractals. As computers were just starting to communicate, there were problems. Computer data was being sent over telephone lines. However, it often wasn't getting through as intended.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, then an employee of IBM, noticed a certain pattern of interference over, say, a ten minute span. He then noticed that same pattern would appear if he looked at maybe a five minute span, then a two and a half minute span, etc.The video called it, "self-similarity". The fact that this self-similarity was taking place, told him this situation could be modeled with fractals.
It is a good video. It is from 2011, so not too out of date. Students no doubt will be chagrined at how excited the math nerds in the video get over these fractals. Even with that - a good video.
