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Introduction

A geometry able to include mountains and clouds now exists. I put it together in 1975, but of course it incorporates numerous pieces that have been around for a very long time. Like everything in science, this new geometry has very, very deep and long roots. - Benoit B. Mandelbrot

This enhanced and expanded edition of THE COLOURS OF INFINITY features an additional chapter on the money markets by the fractal master himself, Professor Benoit Mandelbrot. The DVD of the film associated with this book has been re-mastered especially for this edition with exquisite new fractal animations, which will take your breath away!

Driven by the curious enthusiasm that engulfs many fractalistas, in 1994, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon overcame enormous obstacles to raise the finance for, then shoot and edit the groundbreaking TV documentary from which this book takes its name. The film has been transmitted on TV channels in over fifty countries around the world. This book is not just a celebration of the discovery of the Mandelbrot set, it also brings fractal geometry up to date with a gathering of the thoughts and enthusiasms of the foremost writers and researchers in the field.

As Ian Stewart makes clear in the opening chapter, there were antecedents for fractal geometry before 1975 when Mandelbrot gave the subject its name and began to develop the underlying theory. It took the genius of Mandelbrot, allied with the computer power available to him at IBM, to realize the practicality, beauty and fascination in the subject, and to act as its propagator through a long and influential career.

The first chapter by Benoit Mandelbrot in this book is based on a paper delivered before a Nobel Conference in Stockholm called A Geometry Able to Include Mountains and Clouds. The breadth of his vision, extending from mathematics to economics, from art to language, is extraordinary. As several of the contributors note, once you take a fractal view of the universe, you see the evidence everywhere — in water, in clouds, in trees, in art (see Rood’s chapter), in the human body and in the workings of the World Wide Web (Flake and Pennock). Mandelbrot’s second chapter, Fractal Financial Fluctuations looks deeply into the fractal nature of the growth and collapse of financial prices. His radically new fractal modelling techniques cast a whole new light of order into the seemingly impenetrable thicket of the financial markets.

The article by Arthur C. Clarke is a special case. Its 4,000 or so words are a lucid miniature of scientific popularization, reflecting the excitement fractal geometry induces in so many of its converts. It also, as Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon explains in his account of how the film came to be made, offered a link between himself and Clarke, the film’s anchor, and lent its name to the film project itself.

Four of the film’s contributors (Stewart, Clarke, Mandelbrot and Barnsley) have chapters in the book. Rood, Flake and Pennock, as well as Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, the film’s begetter, contribute original chapters specifically for this volume.

Using a metaphor of a random soccer game, Michael Barnsley with his wife Louisa, the originators of fractal image compression technology, present the ideas of fractal transformation and colour stealing using random iteration for the first time.

Will Rood takes the animation of fractals into a new area by explaining how the M-set is coloured and then how the strange reptiles of Dutch conceptual artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), the ‘undisputed master of tessellated art’, can be mapped onto the exterior of quadratic fractals, allowing the creation of tessellation with fractal limits.

Gary Flake and David Pennock propose an ‘optimistic and realistic’ interpretation of the NFL (‘no free lunch’) theory as a key to understanding the current state of the World Wide Web and how it will evolve over time. Given its huge traffic and lack of central authority, the Web could have been infinitely complex, but it is in fact exceedingly regular; and this regularity can be exploited to make more effective algorithms for finding information on the Web.

The Colours of Infinity brings together all the leading names in the fractal geometry field. Between them the contributors have published at least 200 books under their own names, and in collaboration. You will feel in their articles an ease with communicating sometimes difficult abstract concepts and an urge to share the powerful meanings their insights into the world of fractals have for all of us. In terms of positive energy and commitment to the subject they are a persuasive community.

The last chapter of this collection is unusual in that it sets out the full shooting script of the film, with audio and spoken word alongside. This may well prove invaluable source material in, for example, the educational use of the film, which has gradually increased over the decade or so since the film’s release.

The Colours of Infinity, the movie, made with so much evident pleasure, is approaching cult status and now gains a new lease of life by being coupled with this stimulating collection, expanding the film’s concerns still further.

The soundtrack of the DVD, with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour’s soaring guitar almost an aural fractal in its own right, is totally accessible, as are Will Rood’s beautifully coloured animations of the fractals. The music and the images together have become club and garage favourites, and it is easy to understand why. Is it too far fetched to see in this harmonious matching of sound and image a tribute to the way Stanley Kubrick handled them in the Stargate sequence of his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey? — a powerful link

back to Arthur C. Clarke.

One of the many strange thoughts that the M-set generates is this. In principle, it could have been discovered as soon as the human race learned to count. In practice, since even a low magnification image may involve billions of calculations, there was no way in which it could even be glimpsed before computers were invented. - Sir Arthur C. Clarke

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