The Sierpiński triangle, also called the Sierpiński gasket, is a fractal built by recursively subdividing an equilateral triangle into four smaller triangles and removing the central one, repeated infinitely on each remaining triangle. Wacław Sierpiński described the fractal in 1915, though similar patterns appear in 13th-century Cosmatesque stone inlay. The figure is self-similar at every scale and has a Hausdorff dimension of log 3 divided by log 2, approximately 1.585, between that of a line and a plane. Coloring Pascal's triangle by marking its odd entries and leaving its even entries blank produces an approximation of the Sierpiński triangle that becomes exact as the number of rows tends to infinity, linking the fractal directly to binomial coefficients.
Facts
FAQs
How does Pascal's triangle produce the Sierpiński triangle?
Color the odd entries of Pascal's triangle black and the even ones white.
According to Wolfram MathWorld, coloring all odd numbers black and even numbers white in Pascal's triangle produces a Sierpiński sieve.
Connections
Associated With
Coloring Pascal's triangle by parity of its entries approximates the Sierpiński triangle in the limit.
Source Sierpiński Triangle (Wikipedia)
Attributed To
Source Sierpiński Triangle (Wikipedia)
In Branch
Source Sierpiński Triangle (Wikipedia)
Is Kind Of Object
Sources
1. Sierpiński Triangle (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
The Sierpiński triangle, also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve, is a fractal with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles.
- In Branch: Discrete Geometry
- Associated With: Pascal's Triangle
Attributed To: Wacław Sierpiński, Lead
It is named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński but appeared as a decorative pattern many centuries before the work of Sierpiński.
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