​What are fractals?
​​Why are fractals important?
​"The screen you're staring at right now probably looks like a rectangle. And the plum I ate this morning was circular. But what if I were to look further, and consider the trees that line the street, the leaves that hang off those trees, the lightning from last night's thunderstorm, the cauliflower I ate for dinner, the blood vessels in my body, and the mountains and coastlines that cover land beyond New York City?
​Most of the stuff you find in nature cannot be described by the idealized geometrical forms of Euclidean geometry." -Daniel Shiffman, "The Nature of Code" (2012)

​A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole." -Benoit Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Nature of Geometry" (1975)
Fractals are characterized by self-similarity and recursion . They can be generated using the iterated functions systems method.​
