The Great Wave ...

The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa-oki nami ura, "Under a wave off Kanagawa") "かながわ-おき なみ うら", also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. It was published sometime between 1829 and 1833[1] in the late Edo period as the first print in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. It is Hokusai's most famous work, and one of the most recognizable works of Japanese art in the world.

The image depicts an enormous wave threatening three boats off the coast of the town of Kanagawa (the present-day city of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture) while Mount Fuji rises in the background. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave.[2] As in many of the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.

When looking at this amazing work, one sees that the wave is a fractal in motion, where self similarity rules akin to how the center of a sunflower is created using a fibonacci fractal as the means to make it happen or the branching of trees where 7 or 8 subdivisions rule depending on the species of tree encoutered. 

The Fibonacci Sequence appears in many plants, and can be seen in the distribution of the seeds in the sunflower above.

The Fibonacci numbers are easily defined by an iterative process. We set F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1 and let F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2) for n = 2, 3, 4, … . Thus, the first few numbers of the sequence are

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and 233.

Each entry is the sum of the preceding two. As the values increase, the fractions formed by successive Fibonacci numbers – like 8/5, 13/8 and 21/13 – tend to a definite limit, about 1.618 or, more precisely,

φ = (1+√5)/2.  

I.E - The Golden Ratio/Golden Mean

With this being said, researchers now know that the great wave is a rogue, something suspected but not proven to be true until now.

A team of researchers based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh have recreated for the first time the famous Draupner freak wave measured in the North Sea in 1995.

The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a freak wave in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform. Freak waves are unexpectedly large in comparison to surrounding waves. They are difficult to predict, often appearing suddenly without warning, and are commonly attributed as probable causes for maritime catastrophes such as the sinking of large ships.

The team of researchers set out to reproduce the Draupner wave under laboratory conditions to understand how this freak wave was formed in the ocean. They successfully achieved this reconstruction by creating the wave using two smaller wave groups and varying the crossing angle – the angle at which the two groups travel.

Ain't science grand? :)