Why Judges Should Know the Subject Matter of What They Are Judging

I know that one of my LJ friends has an icon of a Mandelbrot fractal.

When I was in middle school, they had math fairs. I can remember two projects that I entered over the years. I don't remember the years I entered, but I remember the projects.

The one project that did not do well at all and did not impress anybody was one about the math involved in creating optical illusions.

However, I did do one project that impressed many people. The project, if you haven't already guessed, was about Mandelbrot fractals.

Now, you see, the people they had judge the projects at my middle school were not that smart at all. (One of the judges was simply the owner of the Toyota store here in town, Philip Tarver [who quite a few of us know as "dorky haircut guy"] and others did not know about math, either). In fact, the only reason I got to go on to the district competition was that there were only two others who entered the math fair competition, so by default, I got third place.

Anyway, I can remember all the work I did with my dad learning about these. I do not remember everything about fractals, though. Still it is something with an odd repeating pattern that has to do about finding the square root of -1. Then there is a center and offsets that make them produce a pattern. We even had a computer program that produced fractals.

However, I can remember sitting and actually drawing squares to illustrate how fractals work.

Anyway, so many of the teachers complimented me on my project. They were impressed that somebody in middle school could understand the concept of fractals. Yes, at that time, I did understand the concept of them and could explain them. I've just forgotten most of it by now.

So, you'd think that I would end this story by saying that I placed in the competition, right?