CHAPTER 5 Introduction to Fractals Larry S. Liebovitch Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, & Departments of Psychology and Biomedical Sciences Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road Boca Raton, FL 33431 U. S. A. E-mail:
[email protected] http://walt.ccs.fau.edu/~liebovitch/larry.html Lina A. Shehadeh Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road Boca Raton, FL 33431 U. S. A. Liebovitch & Shehadeh INTRODUCTION This chapter is a Word version of the PowerPoint presentation given by Dr. Larry S. Liebovitch at the NSF Nonlinear Methods in Psychology Workshop, October 24-25, 2003 at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. The PowerPoint presentation itself is also available as a part of this web book. Here the notes which can be seen on the PowerPoint presentation by using “Normal View” are presented as text around their respective PowerPoint slides. The concept here is to try to reproduce the look and feel of the presentation at the workshop. Therefore, this is not, and is not meant to be, your usual “print” article. The form of the language here is more typical of spoken, rather than written, English. The form of the graphics is sparser, larger pictures captioned with larger fonts, that is more typical of PowerPoint presentations than printed illustrations. We hope that this experimental format may provide a simpler introduction to fractals than that of a more formal presentation. We also hope that the availability of the PowerPoint file will be of use in teaching these materials and may also serve as a starting point for others to customize these slides for their own applications.