How does one measure the coast of Great Britain? In the 1950s, Lewis Fry Richardson first noticed that countries' border measurements increase as the units get smaller. A decade later, Benoit Mandelbrot argued that the reason for this has to do with the "self-similarity" that coastlines have. Mandelbrot later used the word fractal from the Latin word fractus, meaning fragmented or broken, but he was not the first to observe self-similarity.

In 1883 George Cantor developed simple rules for generating an infinite set: start with a line, erase the middle third, and repeat again and again and again. The result of this creates another fractal, the Cantor middle thirds set.

In this talk, you will learn the history of fractals, various applications of fractals, and some code samples to generate images of fractals using recursive functions. No prior mathematical experience is necessary.