Duplicate of How to program a fractal
What are fractals?
Is this is one of the concepts that is brought over from Mathematics to programming to simplify or solve a particular set of problems?
I am closing this question and have posted a related question
its a type of self-similar shape, often grounded in a repeated mathematical function (but not necessarily). It has nothing to do with programming technique, but the easiest way to view one is to write a program to draw it. (drawing a fractal with pen-and-paper is pretty time-consuming)
By 'self-similar' i mean, if you keep zooming in on different parts of the fractal, it doesn't get any "smoother" or more linear, as would happen with a non-fractal shape. It's degree of complexity is invariant of the zoom level.
the Wikipedia page is pretty useful
If you want to know about fractals in a general non-programming way, I would suggest looking at a general non-programming site. Wikipedia has a good article on them. If you want to know about programming fractals, I would suggest looking at this already asked question:
It even has a fractal tag.
Look up Procedural Generation for one way of how fractals are used in programming. They are an excellent way of generating chaotic/seemingly complex data from a very simple source. The generated data often benefits from self-similarity and other bits of organzation that make the content make more sense to people.
A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured." A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.
A fractal often has the following features:
It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
It has a simple and recursive definition.