LOS ANGELES — What do coastlines, clouds, cauliflower and the stock market have in common? Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot may not have conceived the question, but he provided an answer — one that was ...

The line snakes around the lobby of the Cooper Union Great Hall in lower Manhattan in a complex, seemingly random way. It is at least an hour before the doors will open, but the chaotic assemblage ...

The Mandelbrot set – the fractal ‘snowman turned on its side’ seen above – has graced the covers of magazines, journals, and has even been exhibited in art galleries. An impressive feat for what is ...

At the beginning of my third year at university studying mathematics, I spotted an announcement. A visiting professor from Canada would be giving a mini-course of ten lectures on a subject called ...

The Mandelbrot set, according to Wikipedia, is “the set of complex numbers for which the function does not diverge.” Even if you don’t understand the mathematics behind it, you’ve likely seen the ...

School students throughout the world, if they have access to personal computers, will have probably been given programmes that produce beautiful and complex pictures called fractals. A simple Internet ...

Perhaps it's because they create an infinity of interesting from simple equations. Perhaps it's because they suggest that many seemingly chaotic phenomena have an underlying order. Perhaps it's ...

Drawn from the irregular shapes and processes found in nature, his research benefited a wide array of fields, from art to physics and finance. Steven Musil is a senior news editor at CNET News. He's ...

The mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot is best known for his work in the field of fractal geometry. He told me that when he was seeking a word to describe his geometry, thumbing through his son's Latin ...