Sierpinski carpet. Sequence showing the generation of a plane fractal described in 1916 by the Polish mathematician Waclaw Sierpinski (1882-1969). The sequence starts at upper left, with the removal of a central square from a three-by-three grid of black squares. This process is repeated with the remaining 8 squares (upper right), and repeated again (lower left) and again (lower right). This is an example of a fractal, a geometric pattern that is recursively generated and has the same overall appearance at all levels of magnification. The Sierpinski carpet is a two-dimensional version of the Cantor set. It has a fractal dimension of approximately 1.8928.