A fractal is a space of sorts which is self-similar, to some extent, under rescalings.
There is a concept of fractal dimension which measures how the amount of detail of a given space changes with scale. For ordinary manifolds this fractal dimension coincides with the usual dimension, taking values in the natural numbers. For fractal spaces however the fractal dimension may be a non-negative rational number, in fact a real number, hence a fraction, whence the name “fractal”.
For category theoretic treatments of the self-similarity found in fractals in terms of terminal coalgebras, see
Tom Leinster, A general theory of self-similarity, (arXiv:1010.4474)
Prasit Bhattacharya, Lawrence S. Moss, Jayampathy Ratnayake, and Robert Rose, Fractal Sets as Final Coalgebras Obtained by Completing an Initial Algebra, (pdf)
See also
Last revised on May 16, 2017 at 04:49:54. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.