Mandelbrot’s other advantage was the picture of reality he had begun forming in his encounters with cotton prices, with electronic transmission noise, and with river floods. The picture was beginning to come into focus now. His studies of irregular patterns in natural processes and his exploration of infinitely complex shapes had an intellectual intersection: a quality of self-similarity. Above all, fractal meant self-similar. Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. Mandelbrot’s price charts and river charts displayed self-similarity, because
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