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37th ACS Junior Technical Meeting
22nd Puerto Rico Interdisciplinary Scientific Meeting (PRISM)
University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo Campus
March 16, 2002
INVITED SPEAKER
Dr. Richard F. Voss
Center for Complex Systems and Brain Science
Florida Atlantic University
FRACTALS AND CHAOS: BRIDGING SCIENCE AND CULTURE
The intricate shapes and every changing patterns of the natural world have long been an inspiration and model of beauty to artists, writers, and musicians. Mathematics and science, on the other hand, are often viewed as cold, dry, and uninteresting. If they possess a beauty, it is of a perfect symmetry that is irrelevant to the real world: scientists could send a rocket to the moon, or predict the perfect symmetry of carbon atoms in a diamond, but they could not describe a mountain, write a formula for clouds, predict financial markets, or capture a melody. The mathematics of fractal geometry and the science of chaos are now bridging the gaps between math, science, art, and culture. They treat the messiness of the everyday world. They are based on natural self-similarity (a small branch of a tree reminds one of the entire tree) and observations of complicated behavior from simple equations. They provide a new mathematical language for capturing, manipulating, and simulating nature. The lecture will illustrate the descriptive and creative power of fractals and chaos through computer generated images, animation, sounds, and music. Examples of practical applications of fractals to economics, DNA sequences, early Chinese landscape paintings, and x-ray mammograms will be presented. The unity of building mountains and clouds from mathematics and generating music from the stock market will be demonstrated.