The Fractal Alphabet

Full view is a necessity...

This is the sort of thing I would have absolutely adored as a kindergartener. I have a dream that one day, all grade-school classrooms will be decorated with exquisite mathematical chaos, inspiring their impressionable young minds, raising a new generation of math-magicians and fractal-philes. There will be fractal fairy-tales and chaotic coloring-books- Listen! The teacher's reading aloud from a book called "The Fractal Alphabet"-- I think she just reached the letter M...

M is for Mandelbrot

There was a man named Mandelbrot
The sort of sot who thought a lot
He thought by day and through the night
He sat and thought by candelight

And then he said “I’ll tell you what,
I think I’ve got a sort of thought
A thought I ought to give a shot
And so I will, said Mandelbrot

The thought was thunk by Mandelbrot
To make a complex planar plot
He saw the sort of set he’d got
And stared at what his work had wrought

Chaos, causing mass confusion!
Mystery and math illusion!
Fractures in fantastic fusion!
Swirling in the set solution!

Mandel sat and thought a bit
And said how should I handle it?
It’s broken in a billion bits
So fractal is a word that fits

And so all fractals started there
But we’ve found fractals everywhere
With fractal trees and fractal hair
And fractal breeze in fractal air

Since Mandelbrot got fractal fame
And thought he’d play the chaos game
And give the world a fractal flame
Why, math has never been the same!

So if you think as Mandel thought
And wonder ‘bout the which of what
Remember our dear Mandel’s set
You’ll never know what you might get!



Now, children, storytime is over...your homework is to go back to your computers and a Serpinski Triangle...

Made with Apophysis 2.02, lots of patience, and an odd sense of humor.