Fractal Dimension - History

History

The terms fractal dimension and fractal were coined by Mandelbrot in 1975, about a decade after he published his paper on self-similarity in the coastline of Britain. Various historical authorities credit him with also synthesizing centuries of complicated theoretical mathematics and engineering work and applying them in a new way to study complex geometries that defied description in usual linear terms. The earliest roots of what Mandelbrot synthesized as the fractal dimension have been traced clearly back to writings about undifferentiable, infinitely self-similar functions, which are important in the mathematical definition of fractals, around the time that calculus was discovered in the mid 1600s. There was a lull in the published work on such functions for a time after that, then a renewal starting in the late 1800s with the publishing of mathematical functions and sets that are today called canonical fractals (such as the eponymous works of von Koch, Sierpinski, and Julia), but at the time of their formulation were often considered antithetical mathematical "monsters". These works were accompanied by perhaps the most pivotal point in the development of the concept of a fractal dimension through the work of Hausdorff in the early 1900s who defined a "fractional" dimension that has come to be named after him and is frequently invoked in defining modern fractals.

See Fractal history for more information