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Showing papers on "Fractal dimension published in 1975"


Journal ArticleDOI
Benoit B. Mandelbrot1
TL;DR: The degree of irregularity in oceanic coastlines and in vertical sections of the Earth, the distribution of the numbers of islands according to area, and the commonality of global shape between continents and islands, all suggest that the Earth's surface is statistically self-similar.
Abstract: The degree of irregularity in oceanic coastlines and in vertical sections of the Earth, the distribution of the numbers of islands according to area, and the commonality of global shape between continents and islands, all suggest that the Earth's surface is statistically self-similar. The preferred parameter, one which increases with the degree of irregularity, is the fractal dimension, D, of the coastline; it is a fraction between 1 (limit of a smooth curve) and 2 (limit of a plane-filling curve). A rough Poisson-Brown stochastic model gives a good first approximation account of the relief, by assuming it to be created by superposing very many, very small cliffs, placed along straight faults and statistically independent. However, the relative area predicted for the largest islands is too small, and the irregularity predicted for the relief is excessive for most applications; so is indeed the value of the dimension, which is D = 1.5. Several higher approximation self-similar models are described. Any can be matched to the empirically observed D, and can link all the observations together, but the required self-similarity cannot yet be fully explained.

487 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
Benoit B. Mandelbrot1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied several geometric aspects of the Poisson and Gaussian random fields approximating Burgers k−2 and Kolmogorov, and showed that they can be approximated by Poisson random fields.
Abstract: This paper studies several geometric aspects of the Poisson and Gaussian random fields approximating Burgers k−2 and Kolmogorov .

254 citations