(PhysOrg.com) -- What do mountains, broccoli and the stock market have in common? The answer to that question may best be explained by fractals, the branch of geometry that explains irregular shapes ...

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously once wrote, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." My mind, and assuredly those of countless others, never did after ...

This week, Business Insider has been running a series of math tricks, statistical rules and trading patterns that have investors split in two: skeptics and fanatics. Today we continue with a concept ...

Unexpectedly, the length of a country’s coastline depends on your ruler. As the measuring stick gets shorter (left to right), it can better fit within Great Britain’s nooks and crannies. The shorter ...

And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum. —Jonathan Swift, from "On Poetry: A Rhapsody" The satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels might have been talking about ...

You may not know what fractals are, mathematically speaking, but you know what they look like: tangled, crenelated forms bending and burbling in on themselves into infinity in a geometric, yet weirdly ...

Fractals commonly show up in nature, from spiral-shaped seashells to heads of cauliflower. Now physicists have found these complex, self-repeating patterns in a very unnatural spot: laser light. Peer ...

Fractal geometry is a field of math born in the 1970s and mainly developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. If you’ve already heard of fractals, you’ve probably seen the picture above. It’s called the Mandelbrot ...

A number of years ago, we were in New York City’s Times Square,when we looked up and saw an enormous billboard with a photographthat was taken with a 3.2 megapixel camera. The picture was ...