When you speak to people that understand fractals, they say everywhere and everything is fractals. I have tried to understand fractals but I am completely lost, can someone please explain it like I’m 5?

Question

Side note: I tend to find these people very eccentric, I sorta feel like they can see the matrix 🙂 I am absolutely fascinated by this but completely lost 🙂

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Answer 1

ThreeBlueOneBrown has an excellent (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4) on the subject of fractals and how they are far more interesting than merely infinitely self-similar curves. Ultimately fractals are a way to describe curves that are not smooth. Fractals remain complicated, rough, no matter how closely you look. Self-similar shapes are a helpful example of this, but not the definition. He introduced the very intuitive box-counting method for figuring out dimension in the video.

The definition has to do with the idea of fractal dimension, itself a way of expanding the concept of dimension for non-counting numbers. The stereotypical example, the coastline of Britain, has a dimension of 1.21, meaning that you will continue to find details no matter how far you zoom. The fractal dimension reflects the rate at which new details become apparent as you zoom in.