Hunting the Hidden Dimension

NARRATOR: You can find it in the rain forest, on the frontiers of medical research, in the movies, and it's all over the world of wireless communications. One of nature's biggest design secrets has finally been revealed.
GEOFFREY WEST (Santa Fe Institute): My god, of course. It's obvious.
NARRATOR: It's an odd-looking shape you may never have heard of, but it's everywhere around you: the jagged repeating form called a fractal.
JAMES BROWN (University of New Mexico): They're all over in biology. They're solutions that natural selection has come up with over and over and over again.
NARRATOR: Fractals are in our lungs, kidneys and blood vessels.
KEITH DEVLIN (Stanford University): Flowers, plants, weather systems, the rhythms of the heart, the very essences of life.
NARRATOR: But it took a maverick mathematician to figure out how they work.
BENOIT MANDELBROT (Yale University): I don't play with formulas, I play with pictures. And that is what I've been doing all my life.
NARRATOR: His was a bold challenge to centuries-old assumptions about the various forms that nature takes.
RALPH ABRAHAM (University of California, Santa Cruz): The blinders came off, and people could see forms that were always there but, formerly, were invisible.
NARRATOR: Making the invisible visible, finding order in disorder; what mysteries can it help us unravel? Coming up next, on NOVA: Hunting the Hidden Dimension. PBS Airdate: October 28, 2008