“How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” Mandelbrot had come across the coastline question in an obscure posthumous article by an English scientist, Lewis F. Richardson, who groped with a surprising number of the issues that later became part of chaos. He wrote about numerical weather prediction in the 1920s, studied fluid turbulence by throwing a sack of white parsnips into the Cape Cod Canal, and asked in a 1926 paper, “Does the Wind Possess a Velocity?” (“The question, at first sight foolish, improves on acquaintance,” he wrote.) Wondering about coastlines and wiggly national borders, Richardson
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