I wrote this essay for WRT 102, as a research essay with a topic of my choice. It was quite a delight to write because the topic at hand was very relevant to my life and close to my heart. More specifically, in twisting it and writing it out like a wet towel everytime I hear english-turned-russian words, sticking out like a rusty nail out … Continue reading Anglicism Appropriation “Tendency” in the Russian Language by Maria Sazonova
In science, the fractal is a relatively new discovery. The term comes from its Latin root, fractus, which means “to break” and alludes to the jagged, irregular-shaped edge. It is the term Benoit Mandelbrot, a linguist and mathematician, used in his 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature to define the seemingly random shapes in nature that Euclidean-based geometry could not explain.
Euclidian geometry deals with more smoothly-shaped lines that produce circles, squares, triangles and rectangles. However, the edges produced by nature are not quite so tidy. Edges in nature —coastlines, shapes of leaves, a cauliflower—have extremely complex shapes and are difficult to measure. Measuring and mapping them for any patterns or consistency seemed to be a futile attempt at measuring nature’s randomness. Until Mandelbrot revealed the opposite. Many shapes in nature are actually recursive patterns. They start on the micro level and grow so as to render a self-same macro shape.
The edge of a coastline, as seen from an aerial view, is the same shape as any smaller part of that coastline’s whole. The cauliflower’s bloom is iterative self-same shapes. The silhouette of a tree, it turns out, mirrors its forest’s canopy. Given these fractal systems found all around us, it seems nature is not so random after all.
RhetComp 
