Like Cantor’s dust and Sierpinski’s gasket, its intent was to defy conventional mathematical notions. Its outline is truly monstrous: continuous but of infinite length; you could not draw a line that was tangent to it anywhere along its infinite length. This sort of mathematical anarchy annoyed many contemporaries, who were still pursuing ideals of continuity and order. A French mathematician, Charles Hermite, wrote in 1893 of “turning away in fear and horror from this lamentable plague of functions with no derivatives.”
