AST-9808608 Best In simplest terms, one of the fundamental goals of cosmology is to describe the Universe as accurately as possible. In order to do this, the multiple aspects of the Universe, both past and present-day, must be completely modeled. Some of these characteristics include the age, density, temperature, and extent of the Universe and its components. The research to be carried out will explore the clustering of objects in the Universe. The modern motivation for fractal geometry may best be summed up by this quote of Benoit Mandelbrot: "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." Fractals are, in simplest terms, "objects which are (approximately) self-similar on all scales". The renewed modern interest in fractals has led to applying it to the study of large-scale structure in the Universe, giving a quantitative descriptive scheme to ideas that had been expressed qualitatively as early as C. V. L. Charlier's map of extragalactic nebulae in the 1920s. The Las Campanas Redshift Survey, of about 26000 galaxies, has positional and redshift information on the galaxies and these data will be studied using the pointwise dimension, or PD method. The PD method is an easy-to-use fractal statistic which has numerous advantages over the more traditional methods used to study the clustering of galaxies. It is hoped that much information can be gleaned about the environments of the galaxies in the Las Campanas catalog and these results may be used for comparison of results of studies of future catalogs. ***
