ONLY rarely does the dry theorising of mathematicians strike a chord with the public. Most people have heard of Einstein and his famous equation, E=mc 2, or of Isaac Newton and his apochryphal falling ...

Fractals have become a common sight, thanks to computer imagery In 1975, a new word came into use, when a maverick mathematician made an important discovery. So what are fractals? And why are they ...

The quest by a group of math geeks to create a three-dimensional analogue for the mesmerizing Mandelbrot fractal has ended in success. If you were ever mesmerized by the Mandelbrot screen saver, the ...

See: our gallery of how the Mandelbrot set burst out of two dimensions It may look like a piece of virtuoso knitting, but the makers of an image they call the Mandelbulb (see right) claim it is ...

A group of fractal image makers claim to have made the best three-dimensional portrayal to date of the Mandelbrot set, one of the best-known fractal equations. Yet the path there was not ...

Can we learn everything about the brain by studying individual brain cells? It started with a simple equation. In 1980, a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot working for IBM plotted the behavior of ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. “Economics is a science of fashions – Keynes and ‘pump-priming’ at one time, Friedman and monetarism at another ...