Intrinsic limits on dimension calculations

The combined influences of boundary effects at large scales and nonzero nearest neighbor separations at small scales are used to compute intrinsic limits on the minimum size of a data set required for calculation of scaling exponents. A lower bound on the number of points required for a reliable estimation of the correlation exponent is given in terms of the dimension of the object and the desired accuracy. A method of estimating the correlation integral computed from a finite sample of a white noise signal is given.