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Comment by oxalo | Hacker News Reader

> "He said his transformation also brought a second ability: he can now draw the complex triangle-based geometric designs called fractals. That lets him translate high-level mathematical concepts like Pi and the theory of relativity into easy-to-understand illustrative drawings."

What?

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"Fractal" here just means "mathy arty images".

Yes, it's disappointing that a word with a meaning has been kludged into some other context.

It's kind of worrying that the general population's math knowledge is so weak that we can just dump mathy words into a sentence.

> "It's basically like being forced to see in calculus," Padgett [...]"

But it seems he really is mathematician.

> Now, Padgett is a number theorist

So maybe he has special insight from his life before brain injury of how to speak to non-math people?

Here's his gallery at Fine Art America - http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html (aren't search engines an amazing thing! </s> )

It doesn't cancel that "what" at all. First off, this is nothing to do with fractals. Second, these "drawings" are nothing to talk about, as their nature is pretty primitive. That means it sure requires a steady hand (if drawn manually), but the pattern itself is really simple (foremost because they are very much regular). Have you ever head of spirograph? "Drawings" made by it are far more complicated than this one and can be done in a couple of seconds by any kid. Inventing such patterns is really simple and can be done by anyone (me, you, I hope) and doesn't require any talent or even any significant math knowledge.

Just because the images are relatively simple, doesn't mean they are stupid.

Check out this image and its meaning:

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/a...

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-t...

This one isn't "simple". At least, not "simple" as in "simply reflecting the beam of light at constant angle from regular polygon sides".

Here's a slightly longer version from a couple of years ago. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/04/27/real-beautiful... They say that his brain is over-compensating for the damage in some areas, which has side-effects like being really good at drawing fractals.

Do a Google image search of his name and you'll see some of his drawings. In the video he talks about learning the mathematical equations for the drawings, after the fact.

I'm imagining something like http://www.reddit.com/r/mathgifs but obviously not animated.

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