The man who hand-draws fractals | Hacker News Reader

The man who hand-draws fractals

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Padgett's drawings, viewable from the link below, are not fractals. The fact that they resemble mathematical diagrams in Euclidean geometry does not make them fractals. I would be curious to find out who first christened his work 'fractal', as I think it does him a disservice.

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html?tab=ar...

I don't know why or how they called it fractals.. but am not surprised.... i would have believed them a couple of years ago right out.. Now,i know that am not sure either way.... The point is it's near impossible to be accurate when translating from the language of mathematics to English.. The only difference btw me now and a years b4, is now i have a slightly better understanding of hausdorff and box-counting dimension.... Not good enough to be a mathematician, but good enough to spot the problem in this picture..

No, he's right, those are not fractals. Although they are pretty impressive to do by hand.

I'm sure the Greeks would have had a name for these Compass and straightedge constructions because they made a lot of them.

Some interesting reading on those drawings. This from the "Light is Pi the shape" drawing:

...circle is made up of many right triangles...there is a physical limit to observing the very small (Planck)... "What this means is that you cannot physically add an infinite number of triangles in a 'circle'. You can keep adding triangles only until each "side" to the circle (microscopic sides) equals one Planck length and this is where Pi physically (or relativistically) ends without question. The reason mathematicians have missed this (I think) is because of the lack of viewing math from a purely artistic (purely geometric) point of view.

I agree. To further clarify, the hallmarks of fractals are (1) self-similarity, meaning the parts look like the whole and (2) recursion, meaning the parts themselves have parts (turtles all the way down). Padgett's drawings are beautiful geometric patterns, but lack strong self-similarity and recursion.

EDIT: Except this one. This one is fractal: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/-quantum-tree-jason-padge...

This is a fractal: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/inverted-energy-spiral-ja...

It is obvious how to extend the drawing "to infinity".

I agree that some of them aren't (no recursion to infinity) but others are.

Would you call a bunch of concentric circles a fractal? I hope not. The fractal dimension of such an infinite nesting is zero because the number of objects grows linearly with the level whereas the scale factor varies exponentially.

Hey, how's RAD? You guys rock, keep it up. =) Pretty much my heroes. The game industry is far better off due to your work.

On fractals -- I wish it had a clear definition. It's too subjective. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal. By the popular definition, it seems fine for non-linear growth in the number of shapes vs the level. (Though not especially interesting.) But I agree more with your interpretation.

I agree. Even if they were appropriately fractals, he only draws a truncated version of them (he obviously cannot draw infinitely small)

The loss of particular functions like the ability to see color, or sense motion are interesting demonstrations of the localization of cortical function.

In this case, it is possible that visual area MT (V5) is damaged. This area processes motion signals.

For people interested in follow up reading the story of Phineas Gage is an interesting illustration of the functions of the frontal lobes, and the book "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" is also very interesting.

Also fascinating is Gazzaniga's book "The cognitive sciences" which has chapters relating to very odd sensory/cognitive deficits.

I used to see fractals when I was a child. No one understood what I was saying. Now it's evolved into something larger than that. People still don't understand what I'm saying.

What do you mean by larger than fractals?

Perhaps he got fed a lot of this as a kid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli

I was blown away the first time I saw one of those.

They are surprisingly hard to grow like that believe it or not. That's approximately a 1 in 50 occurrence and the good ones command a high value. I tried for about 5 years to grow one like that unsuccessfully. Various conversations on the Internet resulted in giving up and returning to a more valuable carb-heavy crop (potatoes).

I used to "daydream" a lot. When I would "daydream" I would no longerr see or hear or smell, but I would follow these strange patterns in my mind, always going deeper and seeking and end but never finding one. After about 20-30 minutes, I would always reach a strange point where my mind could not go any further, but I knew there was something beyond the point I had reached.

There were no clear directions, it was a very strange experience. I can't attribute it to a dimension and I did 2 years of University Math. I wish I knew what it was.

They became less frequent as I grew older and I had my last experience at 16. Nowadays, I feel like it has translated in me viewing the infinite of the patterns in this world. It's kind of more than that though, and still I cannot explain it. It makes me not want to speak because everything I say, even in this explanation, is incorrect because these words I'm using do not accurately express the thought, emotion, and experience involved at all.

Thanks for sharing, I think it's very interesting. Don't give up on explaining it though. I'm sure with time and effort you will find a way and/or the words to explain it. If we all spoke more about how we perceive the world, we all would have better words for it, and a better understanding of everything.

What the fract did you just said?

I made several drawings of a similar nature to those shown when I was a child; I'm not sure if my parents still have them or not - though it spanned more from my fascination for mathematics than physically seeing them.

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