Elephants, snowflakes, fractals and infinity...

...one of the most recent areas of discovery and interest in maths is Fractals...

Fractals are amazing geometric shapes that have some pretty interesting properties... they're basically shapes that look the same or contain the same level of detail no matter how far you zoom in... if you imagine zooming in on the circumference of a circle it starts to look straighter and straighter, it's not a fractal...

There's a famous fractal called the Koch snowflake which is made up of equilateral triangles using the simple rule that half way along every side of the triangle there's another triangle a third of the size... 

Some surprisingly complex shapes can be made by fairly simple rules, like one of my favourites the "Mandelbrot Set"...

It's this idea that simple rules can create complex structure that lead us to believe that fractals are behind how much of nature works, and by understanding the behaviour of fractals and what's called 'Choatic maths' we may be able to understand how nature works. 

Can you find some examples of nature behaving a bit like a fractal...? find some and comment on this post... there are gold forms and maths stickers available!

In fact Fractals are used in lots of computer games to make things look as natural as possible.

There's this great woman called Vi Hart who as well as being a great mathematician is an amazing doodler! Check out her fractal influenced doodling...