Abstract: Based on the kinematic viewpoint, the concept of proportional movement is abstracted to explain the strange behaviors of fractal snowflakes. A transformation group for proportional movement is defined. Under the proportional movement transformation groups, necessary and sufficient conditions for self-similarity of multilevel structures are presented. The characteristic topology of snowflake-like fractal patterns, identical to the topology of ternary-segment fractal line, is proved. Moreover, the topological evolution of N-segment line is explored. The concepts of limit growth and infinite growth are clarified, and the corresponding growth conditions are derived. The topological invariant properties of N-segment line are exposed. In addition, the proposition that the topological evolution of the N-segment line is mainly controlled by the topological invariant N is verified.

Key words: proportional movement, topological evolution and topological invariant, N-segment line, fractal snowflake, self-similarity