From clouds and snow flakes, to crystals and blood vessels, approximate fractals are easily found in nature. Coined by french mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975, a “fractal” is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called “self-similarity”.In the case of natural fractals, they display self-similar structure over an extended -but finite- scale range.

Meet some of the most beautiful fractals we’ve found in nature.



