Harvard Catalyst Profiles

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Fractals

"Fractals" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

Patterns (real or mathematical) which look similar at different scales, for example the network of airways in the lung which shows similar branching patterns at progressively higher magnifications. Natural fractals are self-similar across a finite range of scales while mathematical fractals are the same across an infinite range. Many natural, including biological, structures are fractal (or fractal-like). Fractals are related to "chaos" (see NONLINEAR DYNAMICS) in that chaotic processes can produce fractal structures in nature, and appropriate representations of chaotic processes usually reveal self-similarity over time.


This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Fractals" by people in Harvard Catalyst Profiles by year, and whether "Fractals" was a major or minor topic of these publication.
Bar chart showing 86 publications over 29 distinct years, with a maximum of 9 publications in 1999
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.
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Funded by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through its Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, grant number UL1TR002541.