 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Introducing Fractals: A Graphic Guide for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
From Zeno to Mandelbrot: explore this new language with which you can describe the shape of cloud as precisely as an architect can describe a house.
About the Author
Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon is a producer of television documentaries. Will Rood studied mathematics at Cambridge University. His fractal animations have graced many television documentaries and his artwork has featured on numerous magazines, posters and CD sleeves. Ralph Edney trained as a mathematician, and has worked as a teacher, journalist, illustrator and political cartoonist.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I quite like this book, but it doesn't really satisfy my mathematical interest. It's far more for lay-people. But also it has some factual errors, which makes it paradoxically less use for lay people, although they'll probably never know it. E.g., the Cantor set. On page 21 it says "Any point arbitrarily close to the set must actually belong to it". This is technically wrong: the open interval (1/3,2/3) is excluded from the set, and points arbitrarily close to either end of this interval are NOT in the Cantor set (and the same for every smaller excluded interval ad infinitum, not to mention the open sets to the left and right of the Cantor set). Then on p.22 we have a hopelessly inadequate description of the Peano curve, which you can improve upon simply from Wiki - the whole (fractal) point is that Peano took a pattern that could be repeated to infinity at smaller and smaller scales, thus filling the entire two-dimensional plane with a one-dimensional line. After that things aren't so bad, although the maths of the Julia and Mandelbrot sets is interesting, so it's a shame it had to be missed out. Clouds and coastlines and stuff were what interested me, as I hadn't covered them, and the book does a fairly nice job with them and with the Hausdorff dimension (although again the book's use of logarithms is bizarre - the fractal dimension is the log, to the base 'scale-factor', of the repetitions. To divide the log of the repetitions by the log of the scale-factor is merely a shortcut you can use to calculate the actual logarithm).
It looked as though the information density was such that the book would contain a huge amount of info. But then after about the half-way mark it gets thinner on the ground, starting with a diffused biography of Mandelbrot, which didn't interest me much, and the second half of the book contained far less information than I hoped. It was just basically a list of assertions of vaguely related phenomena, a lot of which didn't really have much to do with fractals, as far as I could see - in fact, the meaning of the word "fractal" seemed to morph into "anything that isn't classical", which doesn't really help the subject much. It looked at economics, which is a subject that interests me, although I have no knowledge of it, and a closer, slightly more theoretical look at it would have suited me down to the ground.
My suggestion to lay-people trying to understand mathematical ideas is, if you're interested in maths, why don't you study maths? You would really benefit from it. There are night schools, and there is the Open University. Think about it. I'm thinking of studying economics.
It looked as though the information density was such that the book would contain a huge amount of info. But then after about the half-way mark it gets thinner on the ground, starting with a diffused biography of Mandelbrot, which didn't interest me much, and the second half of the book contained far less information than I hoped. It was just basically a list of assertions of vaguely related phenomena, a lot of which didn't really have much to do with fractals, as far as I could see - in fact, the meaning of the word "fractal" seemed to morph into "anything that isn't classical", which doesn't really help the subject much. It looked at economics, which is a subject that interests me, although I have no knowledge of it, and a closer, slightly more theoretical look at it would have suited me down to the ground.
My suggestion to lay-people trying to understand mathematical ideas is, if you're interested in maths, why don't you study maths? You would really benefit from it. There are night schools, and there is the Open University. Think about it. I'm thinking of studying economics.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is not going to be long, but it deserves to be mentioned that this little book on fractals is worthy of interfacing with a large number of young mathematicians and physicists who might one day be worthy of carrying on the splendid work of people like Mandelbrot, Barnsley, et al who have brought fractals via computers to the attention of the world. A highly recommended opener which could act as a catalyst for others to take forward the connection between reality and fractality.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The passing of Benoit Mandelebrot in October 2010 prompted my renewed interest in Fractals. The mathematics is last year high school/first degree level, and is very readable. However, you do not need to follow all the maths to appreciate the themes covered. Overall, it makes you very much aware of the order underlying the natural world as opposed to man's rather dull Euclidean shapes.
I found the pictures and narrative very helpful, particularly the historic context and the applications of fractals in modern technology. Mandelbot was a great visionary, and this book widens your thought horizon.
I found the pictures and narrative very helpful, particularly the historic context and the applications of fractals in modern technology. Mandelbot was a great visionary, and this book widens your thought horizon.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
great intro, but not much more
If this book is only trying to bring "literacy" of fractals to the general reader, then yes it does a great job, particularly in getting across a feeling for the subject. Read more
Published 2 months ago by T. Rashid
Comic book, but serious content!
What a great intro to fractal theory (for someone like me who needs pictures!). Sadly I still don't understand it, but am enjoying trying. Read more
Published 6 months ago by N. Hall
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
