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I am trying to find the topological and Hausdorff dimensions of the fractal on the attached picture (with proofs). It is obtained by similar approach as Koch snowflake, but applied to a tetrahedron instead of a triangle.

Could you help me how to approach this? or provide me with an article / text-book with the answers?

Koch tetrahedron fractal

achille hui
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2 Answers2

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Paul Lévy, 1938. This construction is found in Paragraph 14 of [1]. An English translation is Selection 12 in [2]. See my commentary in [2], p. 237—238, "A fractal fairy-tale." In the final limiting set, from the outside you have just six plane faces of a cube. Only on the inside do you have complicated fractal structure. This fractal has been described many times over the years, but (except for Mandelbrot) the new describers were unaware that Lévy had already done it.

"user" already gave the Hausdorff dimension $\log 6/\log 2 \approx 2.6$. What about the topological dimension? Since it has plane faces as subsets, it has topological dimension ${}\ge 2$. And since its Hausdorff dimension is $2.6$, the topological dimension is an integer ${} \le 2.6$. So the topological dimension is $2$.

[1] Paul Lévy, "Les courbes planes ou gauches et les surfaces composées de parties semblables au tout". Journal de l'École Polytechnique 8 (1938) 18—25

[2] G. A. Edgar, Classics on Fractals (1993) softcover: Westview Press, 2004

GEdgar
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  • Thank you very much for the answer. I am just wondering... is there any proof that the limiting set is a cube on the outside? – Marko Ruman Jan 12 '18 at 12:54
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At each step, every face is divided into 4 subsets, each with side length 1/2 the original side length then 3 more faces constructed on the middle subset so there are 6 times as many faces. Taking "d" to be the dimension, total area at each step is $\frac{6}{2^d}$. In order that this be a non-zero number in the limit as the number of steps goes to infinity we must have $\frac{6}{2^d}= 1$ so $2^d= 6$. $d ln(2)= ln(6)$, $d= \frac{ln(6)}{ln(2)}$.

user247327
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  • Thank you, that would be Hausdorff dimension. What about the topological one? – Marko Ruman Jan 11 '18 at 12:56
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    Strictly speaking, to complete the proof that this is the Hausdorff dimension, you would also need to verify the "open set condition". – GEdgar Jan 11 '18 at 13:36