Product Description

Studio: Wgbh Wholesale Release Date: 03/10/2009 Run time: 56 minutes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5776 in DVD
• Brand: WGBH HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2009-03-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 56 minutes

Features

• What do movie special effects, the stock market, and heart attacks have in common? They are connected by a revolutionary new branch of math called fractals, which changed the way we see the world and opened up a vast new territory to scientific analysis and understanding. Meet the mathematicians who developed fractals from a mere curiosity to an approach that touches nearly every branch of underst

Customer Reviews

The Beauty of Fractals
This is an interesting and entertaining introduction to fractal geometry. It illustrates how the Julia and Mandelbrot sets were devised. Benoit B. Mandelbrot himself was dismissed and scoffed at by mathemeticians until he authored "The Factal Geometry of Nature", they then realized the connection of fractals & math and nature, even our bodies use it for economy of construction. There is order in so-called disorder except in cases of cancer. But computers were necessary to utilize the full potentials of fractals. This film offers graphic demonstrations. The spinoffs of B.Mandlebrot's book include the first ever computer generated special effects for Star Trek movies, some medical research applications, a quantum leap in design for antennaes for cell phones. Ships now from WGBH Boston.

"The book of nature is written in mathematics" Galileo
"The book of nature is written in mathematics." Galileo

A tree, a bush, a cauliflaur, a brain, a lung system, what all these organic structures share in common is the use of repeating patterns to create a whole that in its macroscopic view is just like its microscopic view.

Called fractals they have also been employed mathematically to describe forces of nature and also knowledge itself.

In one of my very favorite quotes of all time, the late Isaac Asimov observed that "Knowledge has a fractal like structure. No matter how much we learn, whatever remains, no matter how seemingly small, is infinitely complex."

Amazingly though artists had already informally discovered them, fractals came to the fore mathematically only in 1979 when Benoit Mandlebroit began writing about them and their ubiquity in nature. Mandlebroit had been a Jew trapped in France during WWII. He had survived to quickly earn his Phd. and then acquire a reputation as an academic very willing to follow his own hunches.

Lucky for us Mandlebroit overcame early disdain for his discovery and pursued fractal research zealously. As alluded earlier in this notice, examples of both organic and inorganic uses of fractals have dominated research since 1979.

For its part this DVD does an excellent job of discussing the history and various applications of fractals and it also inspires the viewer to further study and exploration of this important area of mathematics which actually turns out to be an example of creation itself.

While nature's "book" may be written in mathematics, this DVD at least allows you to view a synopsis of this chapter on film.

Excellent video
... saw it on TV and had to have it to show my math classes!