Naturalistic Fractals

All the relatives of the gasket are made of three copies, each scaled by 1/2.

With slightly mre complicated rules, we can build fractals that are reasonable, if crude, approximations of natural objects.

Later we will find the rules to make these fractals.

For now, to help train your eye to find fractal decompositions of objects, try to find smaller copies of each shape within the shape.

Queen Anne's lace is fairly easy. The tree is not so hard, except for the trunk.

The fern may be a puzzle: it appears to be made of many, many small ferns along the central stem. Yet we need only four rules to build the fern. In the snowflake, the arms are distorted copies of the whole shape. Moreover, we shall use a rotation to reduce the number of rules needed. This snowflake was made with only three rules.

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Queen Anne's lace is fairly easy.	The tree is not so hard, except for the trunk.

The fern may be a puzzle: it appears to be made of many, many small ferns along the central stem. Yet we need only four rules to build the fern.	In the snowflake, the arms are distorted copies of the whole shape. Moreover, we shall use a rotation to reduce the number of rules needed. This snowflake was made with only three rules.