Analogues in Higher Dimensions
The tetrix is the three-dimensional analogue of the Sierpinski triangle, formed by repeatedly shrinking a regular tetrahedron to one half its original height, putting together four copies of this tetrahedron with corners touching, and then repeating the process. This can also be done with a square pyramid and five copies instead. A tetrix constructed from an initial tetrahedron of side-length L has the property that the total surface area remains constant with each iteration.
The initial surface area of the (iteration-0) tetrahedron of side-length L is . At the next iteration, the side-length is halved
and there are 4 such smaller tetrahedra. Therefore, the total surface area after the first iteration is:
This remains the case after each iteration. Though the surface area of each subsequent tetrahedron is 1/4 that of the tetrahedron in the previous iteration, there are 4 times as many—thus maintaining a constant total surface area.
The total enclosed volume, however, is geometrically decreasing (factor of 0.5) with each iteration and asymptotically approaches 0 as the number of iterations increases. In fact, it can be shown that, while having fixed area, it has no 3-dimensional character. The Hausdorff dimension of such a construction is which agrees with the finite area of the figure. (A Hausdorff dimension strictly between 2 and 3 would indicate 0 volume and infinite area.)
Read more about this topic: Sierpinski Triangle
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—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)