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Comment by mgualt | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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...

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 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.

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

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.

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