Sunday, October 19, 2008

Fractals


I learned something tonight - see this picture above.. a simple geometric quilt pattern? Nope. A fractal. Which is some high falulutin' mathematical concept.
Specifically this is Sierpinski's carpet fractal.
The mathematicians say,
"The construction of the Sierpinski carpet begins with a square. The square is cut into 9 congruent subsquares in a 3-by-3 grid, and the central subsquare is removed. The same procedure is then applied recursively to the remaining 8 subsquares, ad infinitum. The Hausdorff dimension of the carpet is log 8/log 3 ≈ 1.8928" (from Wikipedia)
Me? I say it is a series of nine patches.....
Maybe I can do this maths related thing after all. In fact fractals are shapes which can be divided into smaller units which all have similarities in shape.
See some more complicated (and fabricy) versions here and here

2 comments:

Nikki said...

This is the first time I have seen this type of fractal. My mind says nine patch also! I told you guys Math wasn't so scary.

Kristin L said...

You guys are on the same track as I am. I didn't go fractal per se, but definitely 9-patch and variations thereof. To me, quilt patches in various sizes that are divisible by each other are both very quilty and very mathy.