A Beautiful Math

John Tierney on fractal geometry:

It’s hard enough to make modern mathematics comprehensible in print, so I’m especially impressed to see anyone try to do it on television. Tonight, at 8 p.m. on PBS, Nova is presenting “Hunting the Hidden Dimension,” an hour-long documentary on what it calls a “compelling mathematical detective story,” the discovery of fractal geometry and its resulting applications. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there are lots of beautiful examples of fractals the natural world — and the unnatural worlds of “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”

The documentary, produced and directed by Michael Schwarz and Bill Jersey, tells how the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot became obssessed with “roughness” because so much in nature was not explained by orderly classical shapes like cones and spheres. He developed equations to explain shapes ranging from clouds to broccoli, and the equations turned out to be useful in creating movies, building cell-phone antennas, developing stronger concrete and a myriad of other applications.

You can create your own version of the Mandelbrot set, the most famous fractal of all. And you don’t even have to solve the equations.

Read the whole thing and watch the documentary here.