Synonyms
Koch snowflake; Space-Filling Curves
Definition
A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole” [1]. This term is introduced by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (born 1924) in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured”. A simple fractal example is Koch snowflake. The method of creating this shape is to recursively replace each line segment with 4 line segments in a finer scale as shown in Fig. 1.
Recursively replace each line segment with 4 line segments in a finer scale in Koch snowflake
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Recommended Reading
Mandelbrot BB. Fractal geometry of nature. San Francisco: W. H Freeman; 1977.
Faloutsos C, Roseman S. Fractals for secondary key retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on principles of database systems; 1989. p. 247–52.
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Deng, K. (2018). Fractal. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_541
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_541
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