Watch Clouds Are Not Spheres

Famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot declared the title of this documentary film. He also claimed lightning does not travel in straight lines, that tree bark is not at all smooth, and that the mountains of Earth are not cones. Captain Obvious he was not. In the world of euclidean geometry, in which Mandelbrot grew up, his seemly obvious comments shocked other math majors. He discovered a fractal recursive formula that when programmed into a computer, produces the astonishing Mandelbrot Set. He then introduced this new area of complexity to geometry, showing that our universe is the result of massive organic fractal recursion.

Clouds Are Not Spheres is a 2011 documentary with a runtime of 53 minutes.