Mathematics Day to Concentrate on Chaos and Imagery

Chaos in Hollywood? Absolutely! One activity planned for The University of Findlay’s upcoming Mathematics Day will focus on it.
Mathematics Day will begin at 10 a.m. Friday, March 18 in Winebrenner Theological Seminary’s TLB Auditorium. UF students will be learning about two mathematical concepts at seminars featuring lectures and exercises.
The guest speaker will be Robert “Bob” Devaney, Ph.D., a math professor at Boston University.
The 10 a.m. “Chaos Games and Fractal Images” lecture will describe some of the beautiful images that arise from the “Chaos Game.” It will show how the simple steps of this game produce, when iterated millions of times, the intricate images known as fractals. It will also describe some of the applications of this technique used in data compression as well as in Hollywood. Students will be challenged during a “beat the professor” chaos game in which the winner may walk away with a computer.
At the 1 p.m. seminar on “The Fractal Geometry of the Mandelbrot Set,” several folk theorems concerning the set will be described. While this set is extremely complicated from a geometric point of view, it will be shown that, as long as you know how to add and how to count, you can understand the geometry. Famous mathematical objects in the Mandelbrot set, such as the Farey tree and the Fibonacci sequence, will also be identified.

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