Over My Head in Math

Among other books, I got in the mail yesterday, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", by Benoit B. Mandelbrot. So far I've only been able to flip through it, but it has become quite clear that the mathematical language is over my head, and it might as well be written in German (ie. I have minimal experience with it, and it bears a passing resemblance to English, but not enough to make things intelligible to me.)

However, the book does contain lots of pretty pictures, and I am able to comprehend enough to be amazed that all of the pictures in the book are generated not by an artist [arguable], but by a computer program, or more precisely stated, by a mathematical algorithm that looks nothing like the final result.

The other amazing thing about fractal math is that people have been using it for the past thirty years in computer applications, and we simply wouldn't have as many of the modern technologies that we take for granted if it weren't for fractals. It may be over my head, but enough people in the world do understand it that it can be put to all kinds of practical uses.