Fractal geometry is very
important to the twenty-first century. Fractal geometry helps in medical
research, designed chips in cell phones, animates movies, and is being
applied to more and more concepts daily.
Movie Animations/ Effects
Before people knew about
fractal geometry animated movies were made by hand. People would draw a
character, and draw him in a new position, and then another. The result
would be like a flipbook. When animations came out they were really
pathetic looking and hard to make.
A man named
Loren Carpenter
was working for
Boeing airlines
when the company decided to animate planes flying. Carpenter wanted the
planes to fly over mountains, but he had no way of doing that with the
computer graphics. That was when he learned about fractal geometry and
how it described nature. He decided to use fractal geometry’s concepts
that to make mountains on his computer.
First Carpenter would draw a
triangle. Then he would take that triangle and cut it into four
triangles, and on each of the other triangles he would cut that into
four, and so on. Soon he could make a realistic mountain range for a
plane to fly through. Carpenter then moved on to make entire computer
sequences for the movie
Star Trek,
which was the first Hollywood
film to use an entirely computer generated sequence.
Video Data
Before
fractal geometry video software had to memorize image after image in
order to play a film. Software that uses fractal properties helped
make video files take up less data space. It did this by finding
pixel squares that matched other pixel squares. It would memorize
just those set of pixels and their placement on the screen. Now
instead of software memorizing a whole image it will only memorize
parts of it.
Cell Phones
A hand radio owner named
Nathan Cohen was having difficulty with signals. His radio could only
get a few frequencies and his large satellite dish was making his
landlord upset. After Cohen went to a speech given by Mandelbrot and
there he learned about fractals he had a solution. He decided to make an
antenna in the shape of the Koch Curve, and amazingly it worked the
first time he used it. Cohen found that antennas could be smaller and
more efficient when they showed fractal patterns.
Cohen discovered this around
the time when cell phone companies started to offer their costumers
products like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Push to Talk. The problem was that
each of the different services ran off of different frequencies. To
solve this cell phones needed to have an antenna for each frequency, or
cell phones could use fractal chips.
Cell phones now have little
chips inside of them that receive calls, access Internet, and allow for
Bluetooth. These chips are shaped like fractals. The chips allow phones
to use each different frequency without having ten different antennas.
This is because the chips show self-similarity, which allow it to work
better.
