Math Adventures with Python

10CREATING FRACTALS USING RECURSION

What’s another word for thesaurus?—Steven Wright

Fractals are delightfully complicated designs, where each smaller part of the design contains the entire design (see Figure 10-1). They were invented (or discovered, since fractals exist in nature) by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1980 when he was visualizing some complex functions on a state-of-the-art IBM computer.

Figure 10-1: Examples of fractals

Fractals don’t look like regular shapes we recognize from geometry, like squares, triangles, and circles. Their shapes are ...