Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

Fractals are everywhere. Look at a tree: from trunk to branch to branchlet to twig, you see about the same shape, same proportions. Consider a cloud or an island: impossible to say if you’re seeing something small or enormous, because the proportions of puff or curve stay the same. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot made up the word fractal in 1975 for irregular patterns like these all over nature, patterns that roughly replicate themselves at different scales and could go on forever. Geometry made no sense of these shapes, yet they seemed to follow a mathematical system that involved splitting and splitting again. Mandelbrot’s word comes from frangere: break in pieces, shatter. Lightning, coastlines, rivers splitting into ever smaller streams, cauliflower, capillaries, lungs. A core shape forms a blueprint for possibly endless growth. Spirals are actually fractal, too; they don’t branch, but do self-replicate at different scales, winding inward or outward.