Customer Reviews

Introducing Fractal Geometry

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book was very interesting. It takes a look at fractals and their basic geometric properties and gives a fairly extensive history from their discovery to their current use today. This book is not technical at all and could be read by almost anyone. The best part about this book is that it offers numerous reasons for why we should care about fractals in the first place. It offers an argument that nature is naturally based on fractals and that an understanding of fractals is essential to understanding nature. The book has a comic on just about every page making it an enjoyable and quick read.

Some of the not-so-great aspects of the book are that it is almost too short, not quite technical enough, and has grammatical errors all over the place. I read this book in one sitting and it left me wanting to know more. It makes up for this, however, by listing several books about fractals and chaos theory for you to move on to after reading this book as well as telling you the level of expertise one would need to read these other books. The grammatical errors in the book are numerous. It makes me believe that no one proof read this book before it was published.

Overall, this is a great book to start learning about fractals with. If you are a math whiz, then perhaps you might want to look elsewhere for a more formal introduction to the mathematical properties of fractals, but for the layman, this book is great.

Was this a Power Point presentation... gone missing?

First, it's important to realize that this book is part of a series of "Introducing..." books from a UK publisher. So good authors were probably forced to follow a bad format.

That format apparently required glitzy graphics which overpowered the book. Each small page seemed to be on a separate topic... much like a Power Point slide presentation.

There was disappointingly little coverage of the math side of the material. OK, there really was next to none. The saving grace was the coverage of where fractals were being used in practical applications.

Let me tell you a little more on these graphics. They were (professionally done) hand drawn cartoons. Mostly of famous mathematicians having quirky things to say about the subject, on an 8th grade level.

Overall, I think the authors did a fair job of trying to jamb an excellent subject into a stupid book format. The problem lies most likely at the feet of the publisher. This format makes sense for some of their other 8th grade books: "Introducing Feminism"... Freud... Jung... Marx... Einstein, etc. How they were able to pull off "Introducing Math" in one of these small books is probably a story in and of itself. They even have an "Introducing a Post-Feminism" book, if the first one was not enough.

This book was not a complete zero for me, as I did learn many new things. It was a fast read, but I think I have yet to find the best introductory book on Fractals. If you buy this book, you'll never have to pick up a pencil and solve a problem, or even use a calculator. It's just all... a quick read.

John Dunbar

Discovered this book serendipitously- It's easy to read, and the witty illustrations pull you right into it. It's a good book because, while it follows a logical sequence of explanation of fractals, it can also be opened almost anywhere and "read in". I will pass this book on, both to adults and young people I know, and they will get a great introduction to fractals!

I like the format of these books, but the problem for me is that this one does not fulfil its brief, which is presumably to be, as its title implies, an introduction to a difficult subject for those not well-versed in science.
I am an interested member of the latter consituency, but I found this book presupposed far too much background knowledge - especially of terminology. Not enough is explained for those of us reformed Luddites who need to be hand-held in these matters. I shall try elsewhere. (Luckily, the field of `popular science` writing is a rich and fertile one these days.)

I liked this book.

I believe it will have value to someone already knowledgeable about math and/or systems and looking for a quick and easy survey of the ideas they will encounter as they start learning about fractal geometry. This book will NOT make them an expert on the subject.

I've read other, more technical books on fractal geometry and chaos, so nothing here was brand new to me.

As for an introduction for the layman...well, that's a tall order if you hope to go beyond the "gee whiz!" phase with pretty pictures. For that, this book is probably as good as you can reasonably expect.

1.0 out of 5 stars mixed up, February 10, 2009
By Andres Amador "pickletruck" (san francisco, ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
i'm not new to fractals by any means but i picked up this book in a bookstore and appreciated the simple way the ideas were being conveyed and with lots of graphics. after getting into it though, i was dismayed by it combination of simplicity and then sometimes dense detail. I mean, sometimes he would bring up something tantalizing, something ripe for expansion and then let it drop. and then other times he would go into detail that had me wondering if even HE knew what he was saying.

for a much better read with lots of great images, i highly recommend 'turbulent mirror' its a necessity for those curious is fractals and chaos.

This is something of a companion volume to Introducing Chaos in the same series , as the topic areas overlap. As such there is a little duplication between the two books, but this one provides a deeper appreciation of fractals themselves and the part they play in the development of chaos theory and more particularly the part they play in creating the world around us.

Following the standard format of the series, the book is a combination of text and cartoon style graphics which help diffuse from the outset the fear of difficulty the subject may present.

The book begins with the startling revelation that since Plato, through Newton and into the modern science of particles and waves, we describe the world through our understanding of regular solid forms. What are called Euclidian shapes such as straight lines, cubes, spheres, triangles, squares etc. This Euclidian world of ideal shapes, though a great aid in simplification to make our modelling of the world manageable, invites us to model a world that doesn't really exist. In the real world we rarely encounter these precise shapes. It is a world that is not naturally straight edged, and instead is fashioned with rough edges. Fractals, the fingerprints of chaos, give us a whole new way of describing, understanding and seeing this rough edged world. Once we can see in this new way we suddenly realise that fractals, and thus chaos, are literally everywhere as part of the building and operating processes of this real universe.

Fractals are within us and surround us. From the structure of our veins and arteries, the design of our lungs, the shaping of our brains and even in the nature of our behaviour. For example the behaviour of crowds of people are described by fractal patterns. These same patterns appear in the structure of rivers, the branches of trees, the nature of snowflakes and the patterns of craters on the moon.

The book helps introduce some of the key ideas of fractal understanding. For example self replication where each part of a fractal captures the essence of the whole, and thus the idea that to understand a part is to understand the totality. As another example it introduces ways in which the roughness of a fractal can be measured and places fractals intriguingly in the space between one and two dimensional objects.

It builds on these ideas by developing some of the resulting consequences. For example the coastline of Britain is a fractal and has a fractal dimension of 1.26. It goes on to illustrate that the measured length of this coastline depends entirely on the length of unit of measurement used. The smaller the unit of measurement, the greater the length, with the consequence that the length of the coastline can't be stated with any certainty and tends towards infinity.

Imagine for example driving around the coastline, compared to walking. When walking you will follow little indentations invisible to the driver. Now imagine the coastline walked by an ant, or the coastline at the atomic level.

The fractal thus becomes a way of seeing infinity.
This idea of uncertainty is a powerful one, and one that is essential for a real understanding of change and in turn calls for us to change our thinking..

For example the book provides an alarming example of uncertainty in the solar system. Whilst Newton was able to describe the nature of gravitation between two bodies, it's simply impossible to calculate the attraction between three or more bodies, a limitation not defined by our cleverness, but the nature of mathematics. In truth nature itself can't predict what happens when three or more bodies interact. This is real chaos - and an interesting subject for thought in a solar system of rather more than three bodies.

This book helps reveal new perspectives on how we can see and understand these real processes. The latter part of the book then explores how some of this understanding is being applied in areas as diverse as medicine, engineering, data compression and earthquake prediction.

As with Introducing Chaos Theory it concludes with intriguing references to the understanding of fractals that appears to be inherent and locked into ancient cultures and beliefs. For example whilst modern buildings rarely stray away from Euclidian cuboid forms, gothic cathedrals and churches are for the most part fractal in design whilst traditional African societies are modelled on fractal forms.

This is an intriguing subject which I am sure has great relevance for the understanding of organisational change. This introductory book will allow you to sample the concepts within a day and who knows where the thoughts it stimulates might lead.

I bought this book because I wanted something that would introduce me to the topic, fractal geometry, without overwhelming me with technical jargon, and this book does do that. However, the way in which the book is constructed is quite convoluted. It has illustrations on every page, some of which are left without any description, that may or may not be related to the topic discussed on the page.

The book doesn't progress in terms of chapters, rather sort of chronologically. However, in doing this it just comes off disjointed. The paragraphs are jumpy and disconnected from short telegraphic sentences.
While reading the first 1/3 of the book, I had convinced myself that the book must have been written for an audience much, much younger than I. However, I don't see how that can be logical given the subject material. The latter 2/3 of the book also convinced me otherwise.
So in general, yes, you will learn from this book, provided you are able to follow the progression and are able to correctly interpret the meanings of the diagrams.

This book was an excellent introduction to fractals with clear writing and numerous illustrations. I'm ready for the next level!

Want to learn what fractal geometry is? Get this book, you'll know enough to be able to join in conversations on the topic.