Recursion And Fractals

The following is a short biography of a few of the great scientists/mathematicians who contributed to fractals’ math development. Fractals have been employed to describe many behaviors in economics, finance, astronomy, medical Science, and Computer Science.

Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński (1882 – 1969)

Sierpiński was a Polish mathematician. He made important discoveries in set theory, number theory, analysis, and topologies, publishing over 700 papers and 50 books. He also invented many popular fractals, including the Sierpinski triangle, the Sierpinski carpet, and the Sierpinski curve.

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch

Koch was a Swedish mathematician famous for his discovery of the von Koch snowflake curve, a continuous curve used in fractal geometry.  He was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1905. Von Koch is remembered for a 1904 paper in which he gave a very attractive description of a curve named after him, the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, which was one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician universally known as the father of fractals. While working at IBM in the mid-1980s, Mandelbrot discovered the Mandelbrot set, the most famous fractal, which is named after him. He coined the term fractal to describe the phenomena (such as coastlines, snowflakes, mountains, and trees), whose patterns repeat themselves at smaller and smaller scales.