A K Mittal is currently a visiting scientist at Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, on leave from the University of Allahabad. His research interests include chaos, fractals and their applications, particularly in cosmology and in weather prediction.

T R Seshadri is at the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi. He is presently on lien from Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. Areas of his interest include cosmic microwave background radiation, large scale structures in the Universe and application of fractals in these. 

During the last decade it has been argued by some investigators that the distribution of galaxies in the Universe is a fractal. This is contrary to the standard  view that the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales. In this article, the basic concepts of fractals and their characterization are  introduced with the help of simple examples. The applications of these concepts in the context of  cosmology will be discussed in the second part.

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Address for Correspondence
A K Mittal and T R Seshadri Harish-Chandra Research Institute
Chhatnag Road, Jhusi
Allahabad 211 019, India.