Fractal Resources Index

A collection of resources about fractals and their application to language modeling, information retrieval, Web design, information security, and affine areas.

"There will I am sure be a lot of ways in which the fractal requirement is used in web design."
Tim Berners-Lee in The Scale-free nature of the Web

Introduction

Welcome to the Fractal Resources Index. This is a sub-site of Mi Islita.com focusing on fractals and their application to several knowledge domains.

What are fractals?

A fractal is a pattern that repeats itself. Such a pattern can be found across physical or time scales. These can be found in Nature, man-made objects, and many dissimilar knowledge domains. This is not an overstatement and throughout this sub-site you will understand why.

What's the Fuzz about Fractals?

My interest on Applied Fractal Geometry goes back to the late '80s when I started my doctoral work.

Since then, this interest has spanned several disciplines: from Natural Sciences to Computer Sciences; from Information Retrieval to Information Security, and from Programming Design to Web Design.

Some Examples

The basic unit of a fractal is called a motif. Some common motifs are given below.

Here are some famous fractal 'monsters':

And here is one that can be used as a network architecture or even a site map for a Web domain.

Did I mention something about fractal spam? Since a scale-free network is a network whose distribution follows a power law, how about spam in free-scale social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as mentioned in this research work? Check also here.

Every day I find new ways in which Fractal Geometry can be applied to physical and abstract phenomena. That's why I consider myself an applied scientist--no more, no less. Fractals have opened my knowledge frontier to "think out of the box" and given me the freedom of researching and teaching many dissimilar fields at graduate and undergraduate levels.

Accessing these resources

The link menu at the right column lists our current resources. This menu is found on every resource so you won't have to revisit this index page in order to navigate through these.

The Articles section list links relevant to language modeling, semantics, mathematics, text analysis, clustering, networks, information retrieval, and affine research fields.

The Design section lists links relevant to Web design, document parsing, and art-like shapes. This is an ongoing research area. Work carried out in this area is described in the Demos, Gallery 1, and Gallery 2 sections. To access these resources we recommend readers to read first the articles listed in the previous section, in particular the Fractal Movies, CSS-only Backgrounds, and Two-Column Layouts paper.

I plan to add a Tools section and additional sections. If you have any research question about these resources or for any other related matter, contact me by email or through my blog.

Thank you for visiting this site.