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The Pleasure of Watching Massive Fractals Get Drawn on a Beach with a Rake

How hard could that be?

​Even if the head spaces of "day at the beach" and "quadratic recurrence equation" seem totally impossible to reconcile, there is no place more deserving of a big ol' Mandelbrot set than the British coastline.

Simon Bec​k is the man behind this sand art and those big patte​rns in the snow that seem to make the social media rounds early in winter when snow still seems delightful, and not now when we're just starting to convince ourselves that there is life after snow. It's a relief, then, to see Beck practicing his work on the beach, which is really the most appropriate place for a Mandelbrot set.

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The shape i​s a fractal, a field of geometry named by Benoît Mandelbrot, who was described in his New York T​imes obituary as a "maverick mathematician."

Mandelbrot argued that mathematics could be used to map irregular shapes, like those found in nature. He traced this life-long mission back to the seemingly simple question of "how long is coastline of Britain?" The answer depended totally on how closely you were willing to look, as the closer you were, the more jagged and therefore long the coastline became.

For his part, Beck mentioned in a TEDX talk that he doesn't particularly understand Mandelbr​ot sets. He got a degree in engineering but left the office job to work as an orienteering map maker, because apparently dude's shoes were made for walkin'. About 10 years ago after a day of skiing, he, his snowshoes, and his compass made a five-pointed star, then filled it in, and gave birth to this hobby, and​ now also a book.

When it comes to the beach, Beck uses a rake. While he typically has everything already mapped and protractored out before designing, he claims to have done the Mandelbrot set by memory. Sure, that seems easy enough; just keep running the quadratic recurrence equation, and rake in what you get. How hard could that be?

In the second video, th​e Mandelbrot set becomes the canvas for a message I'm having trouble interpreting, which appears to state that we should be able to get rid of things we don't want from the internet or something. It seems like it was in response to some issue that has perhaps come and gone, since, if there's anything made clear in this​ video of Beck making a self-similar triangle—another fractal known as the Sierpiński Sieve—it's that art on the beach is temporary. Although thanks to the wonder of the internet, like a fractal, its lifespan also approaches infinity.