Koch Snowflake

A fractal, also known as the Koch island, which was first described by Helge von Koch in 1904. It is built by starting with an equilateral triangle, removing the inner third of each side, building another equilateral triangle at the location where the side was removed, and then repeating the process indefinitely. The Koch snowflake can be simply encoded as a Lindenmayer system with initial string "F--F--F", string rewriting rule "F" -> "F+F--F+F", and angle . The zeroth through third iterations of the construction are shown above. The fractal can also be constructed using a base curve and motif, illustrated below.

Let be the number of sides, be the length of a single side, be the length of the perimeter, and the snowflake's area after the th iteration. Further, denote the area of the initial triangle , and the length of an initial side 1. Then

Solving the recurrence equation with

gives

so as

The capacity dimension is then

(Sloane's A100831; Mandelbrot 1983, p. 43).

Some beautiful tilings, a few examples of which are illustrated above, can be made with iterations toward Koch snowflakes.

In addition, two sizes of Koch snowflakes in area ratio 1:3 tile the plane, as shown above.

Another beautiful modification of the Koch snowflake involves inscribing the constituent triangles with filledin triangles, possibly rotated at some angle. Some sample results are illustrated above for 3 and 4 iterations.
SEE ALSO: Cesro Fractal, Exterior Snowflake, Gosper Island, Koch Antisnowflake, Peano-Gosper Curve,

Pentaflake, Sierpiski Sieve

REFERENCES:

Capacity Dimension
A dimension also called the fractal dimension, Hausdorff dimension, and Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension in which nonintegral values are permitted. Objects whose capacity dimension is different from their Lebesgue covering dimension are called fractals. The capacity dimension of a compact metric space is a real number equal to , then such that if denotes the minimum number of open sets of diameter less than or as . Explicitly, is proportional to

(if the limit exists), where is the number of elements forming a finite cover of the relevant metric space and is a bound on the diameter of the sets involved (informally, is the size of each element used to cover the set, which is taken to approach 0). If each element of a fractal is equally likely to be visited, then , where The capacity dimension satisfies is the information dimension.

where

is the correlation dimension (correcting the typo in Baker and Gollub 1996).

Define the "information function" to be

where

is the natural measure, or probability that element is populated, normalized such that

The information dimension is then defined by

If every element is equally likely to be visited, then

is independent of , and

so

and

where It satisfies

is the capacity dimension.

where is the capacity dimension and Baker and Gollub 1996).

is the correlation dimension (correcting the typo in

SEE ALSO: Capacity Dimension, Correlation Dimension, Correlation Exponent

Natural Measure
, sometimes denoted , is the probability that element is populated, normalized such that

SEE ALSO: Information Dimension, q-Dimension

q-Dimension

where

is the box size, and

is the natural measure. ,

The capacity dimension (a.k.a. box-counting dimension) is given by

If all

s are equal, then the capacity dimension is obtained for any . and is given by

The information dimension corresponds to

But for the numerator,

and for the denominator,

, so use l'Hospital's rule to obtain

Therefore,

(Ott 1993, p. 79). is called the correlation dimension. If , then

(Ott 1993, p. 79).

SEE ALSO: Capacity Dimension, Correlation Dimension, Fractal Dimension, Information Dimension