Humans are visual creatures. Objects we call “beautiful” or “aesthetic” are a crucial part of our humanity. Even the oldest known examples of rock and cave art served aesthetic rather than utilitarian ...

Jackson Pollock couldn’t possibly have been thinking of fractals when he started flinging and dripping paint from a stick onto canvas. After all, mathematicians didn’t develop the idea of a fractal ...

A cross section of a fractal pattern, created by a laser in the Wits Structured Light Laboratory. Wits University We all appreciate the beauty of Nature, whether it be cloud patterns, mountain ranges ...

The “coastline paradox” helped to define fractals, but coastlines themselves turn out to be less fractal than thought ...

The simplicity of the stains' repeating patterns is key to why we see so many images in them. It’s easy to see familiar shapes in seemingly random patterns. Witness how many people see faces in clouds ...