It fell to the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot to make the crucial insight that, quite to the contrary, crinkliness, discontinuity, roughness, and self-similarity—in a word, fractality—are, in fact, ubiquitous features of the complex world we live in.17 In retrospect it is quite astonishing that this insight had eluded the greatest mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers for more than two thousand years.
