Notice that in this fractal, the trunk branches upwards into two diagonal squares. Each of these then branches up in an identical manner into two smaller squares. And so on ... . If we delete the trunk square, we are left with the union of two smaller Pythagorean trees, illustrating the fractal nature of this figure. The branching is a little stylized here: you might imagine a vertical trunk line segment splitting into two diagonal segments, and so on. There are many natural occurrences of this branching fractal effect. The name ‘Pythagorean’ comes from the basic three square configuration which illustrates Pythagoras’ theorem.
