And On The Third Day A Few Lines Of Code Were Written To Create Plants…

Have you ever wondered how you would go about designing a new leaf if creation was left up to you? Designing the more intricate details than the overall shape in plants seems a little tiring. A tempting solution would be perhaps to copy and paste some of your earlier work And here we have fractals. Natures version of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

A fractal is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as a complicated pattern in mathematics built from simple repeated shapes that are reduced is size every time they are repeated. Fractals appear everywhere in nature: coastlines, trees, mountain goat horns, lightning bolts, snowflakes and Romanesco broccoli. Fractals are also used (often unknowingly) in art. Analysing the fractals in Jackson Pollock s drip paintings can help to differentiate authentic paintings and fakes.

The Barnsley fern is a mathematically generated fractal pattern that is a model of a black spleenwort leaf. Or in other words a very jazzy fern leaf drawn by a few lines of computer code. The model exhibits the same repetitiveness and branching structures seen in ferns and other plants. As you zoom into a section of the leaf, a leaflet, you see that it is a repetition of the overall leaf. A true mathematical fractal is repeated in such a way infinitely. In nature however, we don t see this infinite repetition, and there is also a degree of randomness that means that the repeated patterns we see as we zoom in are self-similar instead of identical.