Introduction

There are fractals all around you in nature. They sound like very mathematical things (and they are), but you see them every time you look at a piece of broccoli, or a tree, or a mountain range, or ... It is very common these days to see pictures of fractals on posters, T-shirts, mugs and so on. One of the things you should do while you are working on the preliminary task described here is to
find some everyday things which are fractals.

We call something "fractal" if it is made up off lots of copies of itself, each copy smaller than the last one, like these:

[d]

Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-) was a French mathematician who went to IBM in the USA. He created the word "fractal" from the Latin verb frangere, which means to create irregular fragments. He pointed out that natural objects are not all made up of smooth curves and straight lines, but that nature is irregular and fragmented. Fractals help us to describe such things.

In the two videoconferences you will take part in and the project work between them, you will find out a lot more about fractals, and you will make several of your own.