A fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. Roots of the idea of fractals go back to the 17th century, while mathematically rigorous treatment of fractals can be traced back to functions studied by Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor and Felix Hausdorff a century later in studying functions that were continuous but not differentiable; however, the term ''fractal'' was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin ''fractus'' meaning "broken" or "fractured." A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion. There are several examples of fractals, which are defined as portraying exact self-similarity, quasi self-similarity, or statistical self-similarity. While fractals are a mathematical construct, they are found in nature, which has led to their inclusion in artwork. They are useful in medicine, soil mechanics, seismology, and technical analysis.

Characteristics

A fractal often has the following features:

It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.

It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.

It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).

It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).

It has a simple and recursive definition.

Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex (in informal terms). Natural objects that are approximated by fractals to a degree include clouds, mountain ranges, lightning bolts, coastlines, snow flakes, various vegetables (cauliflower and broccoli), and animal coloration patterns. However, not all self-similar objects are fractals—for example, the real line (a straight Euclidean line) is formally self-similar but fails to have other fractal characteristics; for instance, it is regular enough to be described in Euclidean terms.

Images of fractals can be created using fractal-generating software. Images produced by such software are normally referred to as being fractals even if they do not have the above characteristics, such as when it is possible to zoom into a region of the fractal that does not exhibit any fractal properties. Also, these may include calculation or display artifacts which are not characteristics of true fractals.

History

The mathematics behind fractals began to take shape in the 17th century when a mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz considered recursive self-similarity (although he made the mistake of thinking that only the straight line was self-similar in this sense).

It was not until 1872 that a function appeared whose graph would today be considered fractal, when Karl Weierstrass gave an example of a function with the non-intuitive property of being everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable. In 1904, Helge von Koch, dissatisfied with Weierstrass's abstract and analytic definition, gave a more geometric definition of a similar function, which is now called the Koch curve. Wacław Sierpiński constructed his triangle in 1915 and, one year later, his carpet. The idea of self-similar curves was taken further by Paul Pierre Lévy, who, in his 1938 paper ''Plane or Space Curves and Surfaces Consisting of Parts Similar to the Whole'' described a new fractal curve, the Lévy C curve. Georg Cantor also gave examples of subsets of the real line with unusual properties—these Cantor sets are also now recognized as fractals.

Iterated functions in the complex plane were investigated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Henri Poincaré, Felix Klein, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia. Without the aid of modern computer graphics, however, they lacked the means to visualize the beauty of many of the objects that they had discovered.

In the 1960s, Benoît Mandelbrot started investigating self-similarity in papers such as ''How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension'', which built on earlier work by Lewis Fry Richardson. Finally, in 1975 Mandelbrot coined the word "fractal" to denote an object whose Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimension is greater than its topological dimension. He illustrated this mathematical definition with striking computer-constructed visualizations. These images captured the popular imagination; many of them were based on recursion, leading to the popular meaning of the term "fractal".

Examples

A class of examples is given by the Cantor sets, Sierpinski triangle and carpet, Menger sponge, dragon curve, space-filling curve, and Koch curve. Additional examples of fractals include the Lyapunov fractal and the limit sets of Kleinian groups. Fractals can be deterministic (all the above) or stochastic (that is, non-deterministic). For example, the trajectories of the Brownian motion in the plane have a Hausdorff dimension of 2.

Chaotic dynamical systems are sometimes associated with fractals. Objects in the phase space of a dynamical system can be fractals (see attractor). Objects in the parameter space for a family of systems may be fractal as well. An interesting example is the Mandelbrot set. This set contains whole discs, so it has a Hausdorff dimension equal to its topological dimension of 2—but what is truly surprising is that the boundary of the Mandelbrot set also has a Hausdorff dimension of 2 (while the topological dimension of 1), a result proved by Mitsuhiro Shishikura in 1991. A closely related fractal is the Julia set.

Generation

Five common techniques for generating fractals are:

Escape-time fractals – (also known as "orbits" fractals) These are defined by a formula or recurrence relation at each point in a space (such as the complex plane). Examples of this type are the Mandelbrot set, Julia set, the Burning Ship fractal, the Nova fractal and the Lyapunov fractal. The 2d vector fields that are generated by one or two iterations of escape-time formulae also give rise to a fractal form when points (or pixel data) are passed through this field repeatedly.

Iterated function systems – These have a fixed geometric replacement rule. Cantor set, Sierpinski carpet, Sierpinski gasket, Peano curve, Koch snowflake, Harter-Heighway dragon curve, T-Square, Menger sponge, are some examples of such fractals.

Random fractals – Generated by stochastic rather than deterministic processes, for example, trajectories of the Brownian motion, Lévy flight, percolation clusters, self avoiding walks, fractal landscapes and the Brownian tree. The latter yields so-called mass- or dendritic fractals, for example, diffusion-limited aggregation or reaction-limited aggregation clusters.

Strange attractors – Generated by iteration of a map or the solution of a system of initial-value differential equations that exhibit chaos.

L-systems - These are generated by string rewriting and are designed to model the branching patterns of plants.

Classification

Fractals can also be classified according to their self-similarity. There are three types of self-similarity found in fractals:

Exact self-similarity – This is the strongest type of self-similarity; the fractal appears identical at different scales. Fractals defined by iterated function systems often display exact self-similarity. For example, the Sierpinski triangle and Koch snowflake exhibit exact self-similarity.

Quasi-self-similarity – This is a looser form of self-similarity; the fractal appears approximately (but not exactly) identical at different scales. Quasi-self-similar fractals contain small copies of the entire fractal in distorted and degenerate forms. Fractals defined by recurrence relations are usually quasi-self-similar. The Mandelbrot set is quasi-self-similar, as the satellites are approximations of the entire set, but not exact copies.

Statistical self-similarity – This is the weakest type of self-similarity; the fractal has numerical or statistical measures which are preserved across scales. Most reasonable definitions of "fractal" trivially imply some form of statistical self-similarity. (Fractal dimension itself is a numerical measure which is preserved across scales.) Random fractals are examples of fractals which are statistically self-similar. The coastline of Britain is another example; one cannot expect to find microscopic Britains (even distorted ones) by looking at a small section of the coast with a magnifying glass.

Possessing self-similarity is not the sole criterion for an object to be termed a fractal. Examples of self-similar objects that are not fractals include the logarithmic spiral and straight lines, which do contain copies of themselves at increasingly small scales. These do not qualify, since they have the same Hausdorff dimension as topological dimension.

In nature

Approximate fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar structure over an extended, but finite, scale range. Examples include clouds, river networks, fault lines, mountain ranges, craters, snow flakes, crystals, lightning, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels, and ocean waves. DNA and heartbeat can be analyzed as fractals. Even coastlines may be loosely considered fractal in nature.

Trees and ferns are fractal in nature and can be modeled on a computer by using a recursive algorithm. This recursive nature is obvious in these examples—a branch from a tree or a frond from a fern is a miniature replica of the whole: not identical, but similar in nature. The connection between fractals and leaves is currently being used to determine how much carbon is contained in trees.

In 1999, certain self similar fractal shapes were shown to have a property of "frequency invariance"—the same electromagnetic properties no matter what the frequency—from Maxwell's equations (see fractal antenna).

In creative works

Fractal patterns have been found in the paintings of American artist Jackson Pollock. While Pollock's paintings appear to be composed of chaotic dripping and splattering, computer analysis has found fractal patterns in his work.

Decalcomania, a technique used by artists such as Max Ernst, can produce fractal-like patterns. It involves pressing paint between two surfaces and pulling them apart.

Cyberneticist Ron Eglash has suggested that fractal-like structures are prevalent in African art and architecture. Circular houses appear in circles of circles, rectangular houses in rectangles of rectangles, and so on. Such scaling patterns can also be found in African textiles, sculpture, and even cornrow hairstyles.

In a 1996 interview with Michael Silverblatt, David Foster Wallace admitted that the structure of the first draft of ''Infinite Jest'' he gave to his editor Michael Pietsch was inspired by fractals, specifically the Sierpinski triangle (aka Sierpinski gasket) but that the edited novel is "more like a lopsided Sierpinsky Gasket".

Applications

As described above, random fractals can be used to describe many highly irregular real-world objects. Other applications of fractals include:

Classification of histopathology slides in medicine

Fractal landscape or Coastline complexity

Enzyme/enzymology (Michaelis-Menten kinetics)

Generation of new music

Signal and image compression

Creation of digital photographic enlargements

Seismology

Fractal in soil mechanics

Computer and video game design, especially computer graphics for organic environments and as part of procedural generation

Fractography and fracture mechanics

Fractal antennas – Small size antennas using fractal shapes

Small angle scattering theory of fractally rough systems

T-shirts and other fashion

Generation of patterns for camouflage, such as MARPAT

Digital sundial

Technical analysis of price series (see Elliott wave principle)

Fractals in networks

See also

Banach fixed point theorem

Bifurcation theory

Butterfly effect

Complexity

Constructal theory

Cymatics

Diamond-square algorithm

Droste effect

Feigenbaum function

Fractal compression

Fractal cosmology

Fractal networks

Fractint

Fracton

Golden ratio

Graftal

Greeble

Lacunarity

List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension

Publications in fractal geometry

Mandelbulb

Multifractal system

Newton fractal

Percolation

Power law

Random walk

Sacred geometry

Self avoiding walk

Self-reference

Strange loop

Turbulence

References

;Notes

;Further reading

Barnsley, Michael F., and Hawley Rising. ''Fractals Everywhere''. Boston: Academic Press Professional, 1993. ISBN 0-12-079061-0

Falconer, Kenneth. '' Techniques in Fractal Geometry''. John Wiley and Sons, 1997. ISBN 0-471-92287-0

Jürgens, Hartmut, Heins-Otto Peitgen, and Dietmar Saupe. ''Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science''. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992. ISBN 0-387-97903-4

Benoît B. Mandelbrot ''The Fractal Geometry of Nature''. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1982. ISBN 0-7167-1186-9

Peitgen, Heinz-Otto, and Dietmar Saupe, eds. ''The Science of Fractal Images''. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988. ISBN 0-387-96608-0

Clifford A. Pickover, ed. ''Chaos and Fractals: A Computer Graphical Journey - A 10 Year Compilation of Advanced Research''. Elsevier, 1998. ISBN 0-444-50002-2

Jesse Jones, ''Fractals for the Macintosh'', Waite Group Press, Corte Madera, CA, 1993. ISBN 1-878739-46-8.

Hans Lauwerier, ''Fractals: Endlessly Repeated Geometrical Figures'', Translated by Sophia Gill-Hoffstadt, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1991. ISBN 0-691-08551-X, cloth. ISBN 0-691-02445-6 paperback. "This book has been written for a wide audience..." Includes sample BASIC programs in an appendix.

Bernt Wahl, Peter Van Roy, Michael Larsen, and Eric Kampman ''Exploring Fractals on the Macintosh'', Addison Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-201-62630-6

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. "The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty, The Power and the Sense of Fractals." ISBN 1-904555-05-5 (The book comes with a related DVD of the Arthur C. Clarke documentary introduction to the fractal concept and the Mandelbrot set.

Gouyet, Jean-François. ''Physics and Fractal Structures'' (Foreword by B. Mandelbrot); Masson, 1996. ISBN 2-225-85130-1, and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996. ISBN 978-0-387-94153-0. Out-of-print. Available in PDF version at. |publisher=Jfgouyet.fr |date= |accessdate=2010-10-17}}

External links

Shlomo Havlin: ''Scaling and Fractals''

FrakOut!: an OSS application for calculating the fractal dimension of a shape using the box counting method

*Fractals Category:Digital art Category:Mathematical structures Category:Topology

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Coordinates	34°03′″N118°15′″N
name	Benoît Mandelbrot
birth date	November 20, 1924
birth place	Warsaw, Poland
death date	October 14, 2010
death place	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
residence	Poland; France; United States
nationality	Polish, French, American
ethnicity	Lithuanian Jewish
field	Mathematics, Aerodynamics
alma mater	École PolytechniqueCalifornia Institute of TechnologyUniversity of Paris
work institutions	Yale UniversityInternational Business Machines(IBM)Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
known for	Mandelbrot set, Fractals, Chaos Theory, Zipf–Mandelbrot law
prizes	Harvey Prize (1989)Wolf Prize (1993)Japan Prize (2003)The Franklin MedalLégion d'honneur (the Legion of Honour) }}

Benoît B. Mandelbrot in English. When speaking in French, Mandelbrot pronounced his name .|group=note}} (20 November 1924 14 October 2010) was a French American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child. Mandelbrot spent much of his life living and working in the United States, and he acquired dual French and American citizenship.

Mandelbrot worked on a wide range of mathematical problems, including mathematical physics and quantitative finance, but is best known as the father of fractal geometry. He coined the term fractal and described the Mandelbrot set. Mandelbrot extensively popularized his work, writing books and giving lectures aimed at the general public.

Mandelbrot spent most of his career at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and was appointed as an IBM Fellow. He later became a Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale's history to receive tenure. Mandelbrot also held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Université Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Early years

Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw into a Jewish family from Lithuania. Mandelbrot was born into a family with a strong academic tradition - his mother was a physician and he was introduced to mathematics by two of his uncles, one of whom, Szolem Mandelbrojt, was a mathematician who resided in Paris. However, his father made his living trading clothing. Anticipating the threat posed by Nazi Germany, the family fled from Poland to France in 1936 when he was 11. Mandelbrot attended the Lycée Rolin in Paris until the start of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, France. He was helped by Rabbi David Feuerwerker, the Rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, to continue his studies. In 1944 he returned to Paris. He studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and in 1945 - 47 attended the École Polytechnique, where he studied under Gaston Julia and Paul Lévy. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at California Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in aeronautics. Returning to France, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Paris in 1952.

From 1949 to 1958 Mandelbrot was a staff member at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During this time he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was sponsored by John von Neumann. In 1955 he married Aliette Kagan and moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and later to the Université Lille Nord de France. In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He remained at IBM for 35 years, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus.

Research career

From 1951 onward, Mandelbrot worked on problems and published papers not only in mathematics but in applied fields such as information theory, economics, and fluid dynamics. He became convinced that two key themes, fat tails and self-similar structure, ran through a multitude of problems encountered in those fields.

Mandelbrot found that price changes in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution, but rather Lévy stable distributions having theoretically infinite variance. He found, for example, that cotton prices followed a Lévy stable distribution with parameter α equal to 1.7 rather than 2 as in a Gaussian distribution. "Stable" distributions have the property that the sum of many instances of a random variable follows the same distribution but with a larger scale parameter.

Mandelbrot also put his ideas to work in cosmology. He offered in 1974 a new explanation of Olbers' paradox (the "dark night sky" riddle), demonstrating the consequences of fractal theory as a sufficient, but not necessary, resolution of the paradox. He postulated that if the stars in the universe were fractally distributed (for example, like Cantor dust), it would not be necessary to rely on the Big Bang theory to explain the paradox. His model would not rule out a Big Bang, but would allow for a dark sky even if the Big Bang had not occurred.

In 1975, Mandelbrot coined the term ''fractal'' to describe these structures, and published his ideas in ''Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension'' (1975; an English translation ''Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension'' was published in 1977). Mandelbrot developed here ideas from the article ''Deux types fondamentaux de distribution statistique'' (1938; an English translation ''Two Basic Types of Statistical Distribution'') of Czech geographer, demographer and statistician Jaromír Korčák.

While on secondment as Visiting Professor at Harvard University in 1979, Mandelbrot began to study fractals called Julia sets that were invariant under certain transformations of the complex plane. Building on previous work by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou, Mandelbrot used a computer to plot images of the Julia sets of the formula ''z''² − μ. While investigating how the topology of these Julia sets depended on the complex parameter μ he studied the Mandelbrot set fractal that is now named after him. (Note that the Mandelbrot set is now usually defined in terms of the formula ''z''² + ''c'', so Mandelbrot's early plots in terms of the earlier parameter μ are left–right mirror images of more recent plots in terms of the parameter ''c''.)

In 1982, Mandelbrot expanded and updated his ideas in ''The Fractal Geometry of Nature''. This influential work brought fractals into the mainstream of professional and popular mathematics, as well as silencing critics, who had dismissed fractals as "program artifacts".

Mandelbrot left IBM in 1987, after 35 years and 12 days, when IBM decided to end pure research in his division. He joined the Department of Mathematics at Yale, and obtained his first tenured post in 1999, at the age of 75. At the time of his retirement in 2005, he was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences. His awards include the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993, the Lewis Fry Richardson Prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, the Japan Prize in 2003, and the Einstein Lectureship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006.

The small asteroid 27500 Mandelbrot was named in his honor. In November 1990, he was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honour. In December 2005, Mandelbrot was appointed to the position of Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Mandelbrot was promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honour in January 2006. An honorary degree from Johns Hopkins University was bestowed on Mandelbrot in the May 2010 commencement exercises.

Fractals and regular roughness

Although Mandelbrot coined the term ''fractal'', some of the mathematical objects he presented in ''The Fractal Geometry of Nature'' had been described by other mathematicians. Before Mandelbrot, they had been regarded as isolated curiosities with unnatural and non-intuitive properties. Mandelbrot brought these objects together for the first time and turned them into essential tools for the long-stalled effort to extend the scope of science to non-smooth objects in the real world. He highlighted their common properties, such as self-similarity (linear, non-linear, or statistical), scale invariance, and a (usually) non-integer Hausdorff dimension.

He also emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many "rough" phenomena in the real world. Natural fractals include the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies; and Brownian motion. Fractals are found in human pursuits, such as music, painting, architecture, and stock market prices. Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry:

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.  —Mandelbrot, in his introduction to ''The Fractal Geometry of Nature''

Mandelbrot has been called a visionary and a maverick. His informal and passionate style of writing and his emphasis on visual and geometric intuition (supported by the inclusion of numerous illustrations) made ''The Fractal Geometry of Nature'' accessible to non-specialists. The book sparked widespread popular interest in fractals and contributed to chaos theory and other fields of science and mathematics.

When visiting the Museu de la Ciència de Barcelona in 1988, he told its director that the painting The Face of War had given him "the intuition about the transcendence of the fractal geometry when making intelligible the omnipresent similitude in the forms of nature". He also said that, fractally, Gaudí was superior to Van der Rohe.

Death

Mandelbrot died in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 14 October 2010 from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 85. Reacting to news of his death, mathematician Heinz-Otto Peitgen said "if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years." Chris Anderson described Mandelbrot as "an icon who changed how we see the world." French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Mandelbrot had "a powerful, original mind that never shied away from innovating and shattering preconceived notions". Sarkozy also added, "His work, developed entirely outside mainstream research, led to modern information theory." Mandelbrot's obituary in The Economist points out his fame as "celebrity beyond the academy" and lauds him as the "father of fractal geometry."

Honors and awards

A partial list of awards received by Mandelbrot: {| |- |valign="top"|

2004 Best Business Book of the Year Award

AMS Einstein Lectureship

Barnard Medal

Caltech Service

Casimir Funk Natural Sciences Award

Charles Proteus Steinmetz Medal

Franklin Medal

|valign="top"|

Harvey Prize

Honda Prize

Humboldt Preis

Fellow, American Geophysical Union

IBM Fellowship

Japan Prize

John Scott Award

Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honour)

Lewis Fry Richardson Medal

|valign="top"|

Medaglia della Presidenza della Repubblica Italiana

Médaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris

Nevada Prize

Science for Art

Sven Berggren-Priset

Władysław Orlicz Prize

Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics

|} Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

See also

"How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension", a 1967 paper by Mandelbrot

Louis Bachelier

Mandelbrot Competition

Skewness risk and Kurtosis risk

Notes

References

Further reading

Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jürgens, Dietmar Saupe and Cornelia Zahlten: ''Fractals: An Animated Discussion'' (63 min video film, interviews with Benoît Mandelbrot and Edward Lorenz, computer animations), W.H. Freeman and Company, 1990. ISBN 0-716-72213-5 (re-published by Films for the Humanities & Sciences, ISBN 978-0-7365-0520-8)

'''', NOVA, WGBH TV, PBS, October 28, 2008.

External links

Mandelbrot's page at Yale

Ted talk: "Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness"

Interview at FT.com, in which Mandelbrot discusses his early work with stock market behavior, 2009-09-30

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Coordinates	34°03′″N118°15′″N
name	Tara Simmons
background	solo_singer
origin	Brisbane, Australia
born	March 22, 1984
genre	FolkPopAlternativeRockElectronica
years active	2006–present
label	Independent
website	tarasimmons.com }}

Tara Emily Simmons (born 22 March 1984) is a musician residing in Brisbane, Australia. Simmons is proficient in voice, keys and sometimes cello and is known for her use of bedroom, bathroom and kitchen items to sample extra sounds for her recordings.

History

Tara began to play piano at the age of three and the cello at the age of eight, dabbling in songwriting along the way. Vocal lessons soon followed and she attended a performing arts school that taught her music technology and performance. She then went on to study at university in both production and songwriting at the Queensland University of Technology.

Career

In 2005, Simmons began recording her self-financed, self-produced seven track debut EP ''Pendulum'' but quickly shelved it, thinking it wasn't good enough. She eventually sent a copy to Caroline Tran at Australian radio station Triple J radio who took a liking to its lead single 'Everybody Loves You' and played it a number of times. The song also went on to be a finalist at the Q Song Awards 2006 and selected as a feature song for Triple J OzMusic Month. She eventually realized the EP's potential and it was released in August 2006.

Immediately returning to the studio, this time with her cellist Briony Luttrell, Simmons began recording songs for her four track second EP ''All The Amendments''. By the time it was released in February 2007, Simmons had garnered the attention of community and national radio and played as support for My Latest Novel and Home Video.

Triple J radio once again played an important part of the promotion of ''All The Amendments'', playing the EP's lead single 'The Recycling Bin Song'.

In October 2007, Tara had the 11 tracks from her two previous EPs remastered and repackaged onto a single disc compilation entitled ''EPilation'', a term Tara herself created meaning "EP compilation."

Also in October 2007, Tara began work on songs for her debut album with co-producer Briony Luttrell. Recording in the apartment they share, Tara and Briony began work on a track called 'You And Me', which is commonly referred to as "that song with the three cellos" when they perform it live.

In August 2008, a new song from Tara's recent recording sessions called ''Shake'' was nominated for a Q Song Award in the Pop Category. On Valentine's Day 2009, Tara once again sold out the Judtih Wright Centre for the launch of her debut album Spilt Milk. She performed the album in its entireity plus "Pendulum" from her first EP and a cover of They Might Be Giants' song Dr. Worm.

In November 2009, Tara released a brand new EP by the name of ''All You Can''. It was a production collaboration between herself and producer Yanto Browning and spawned two radio singles 'All You Can' and 'I Cannot Be Saved'. In May 2010, Tara embarked on her first tour of Vietnam where she played shows to thousands of soldiers.

Band members

On stage, Simmons plays with a unique configuration of band including:

Tara Simmons: vocals, keys, laptap, cello

Briony Luttrell: cello

Emma Hales: cello

Chris O'Neill: drums

Justin Bliss: double bass

Discography

Albums

''Spilt Milk'' (February, 2009)

EPs

''Pendulum'' (August, 2006)

''All The Amendments'' (February, 2007)

''All You Can'' (November 2009)

Singles

"Everybody Loves You" (2006)

"The Recycling Bin Song" (2007)

"When You Say That I Don't Care About You" (2009)

"All You Can" (2009)

"I Cannot Be Saved" (2010)

Compilations

''EPilation'' (2008)

Soundtrack Appearances

''All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane'' (2007)

::Track: ''Everybody Loves You''

Compilation appearances

''Songs Of Applewood'' (2007)

::Track: ''Go And Stop'' with Guy Webster

References

External links

Official website

Tara Simmons at MySpace

Tara Simmons @ Sonic Bids

Interview with Time Off magazine February 2007

Review of ''Pendulum'' in Time Off magazine November 2006

Review of ''All The Amendments'' in Rave magazine February 2007

Tara Simmons on Brispop.com

Interview In Time Off October 2007

Category:1984 births Category:Australian musicians Category:People from Brisbane Category:Living people Category:Australian singer-songwriters Category:Australian female singers