Wednesday, November 10, 2010

November Staff Picks


Candy’s Pick for November
PBS Home Video – Fractals Hunting the Hidden Dimension
DVD QA 614.86 .F73 2009
What does broccoli, a tree, a river delta, and your veins have in common? Fractals! Watch this DVD, and it all will become clear, well most of it anyway. It explains Benoit Mandelbrot’s theory behind fractals. A fractal is a repeated pattern (called iteration, if you speak math) and can become something else on its own. It tells how a Pixar animator was inspired to create the very first computer animated scene in The Wrath of Khan (remember the Genesis planet?) when computers were not as powerful as they are today. Finally, math has a real application!

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