When it comes to the study of both human nature and the natural world, one must be willing to reckon with the fact that a certain degree of chaos will be present in whatever facets of this planet they ...

The Mandelbrot set is — when visualized with some colors — an interesting shape with infinite detail. While the patterns are immediately obvious to the human eye, anyone who’s run one can tell you ...

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. —Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature As the ...

The image above, generated from a relatively simple mathematical formula, has become iconic and permanently connected with the man who identified it: mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. But its iconic ...

Can we learn everything about the brain by studying individual brain cells? It started with a simple equation. In 1980, a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot working for IBM plotted the behavior of ...

Randomness is all around you…or so you think. Consider the various shapes of the morning clouds, the jagged points of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the twists and turns of England’s coastline and the ...