Hello. This is a welcome post.
So welcome to Fractal Forward, a blog about everything. Not necessarily everything about everything, but the interesting paradoxes that show up in everything. And not just the paradoxes, but also the things that are abstractly true for every piece of the whole. Really, I haven’t thought this through.
If you’re like me, you think more pictorially than linearly. When I understand what I read, I feel the picture and not just the words. For me to understand something in work or school, I need to be able to picture it in my mind. Fractals are the pictures created by a type of math. They govern nature, show up in sciences, and permeate human culture. Despite this, I don’t see them considered in the culture (except amongst the hippies).
I do think there is something extremely powerful in looking at life through a Fractal lens. Fractals sit at the intersection of beauty and math. Seeing a zooming image of the Mandelbrot set inspires awe, regardless of your mathematical background. It doesn’t feel like a simple equation should be able to create something infinitely complex, yet we know the equation that defines the Mandelbrot set (fc(z) = z^2 + c). We feel the same awe when looking at the night sky, and this awe is what I want to dig into. While we don’t know the equation of our own universe, thinking about our own experiences and knowledge through the fractal analogy leads to useful and actionable insights.
It has been extremely difficult to describe why I think fractals deserve to be the fundamental analogy for thinking about life, and I’m writing this to work through the idea myself. This will also serve as an outlet for all of the things I’m learning; if life is one big fractal pattern, then you can learn a little bit about the whole by looking at any of the pieces. Conveniently, I can shoehorn anything into the Fractal Analogy with this sleight of hand. Through my doodles and writing, I hope to paint a picture that shows how the complexity and chaos of the world is produced from simplicity, moment by moment.
So thank you for reading, and I’m glad you’re here with me. Rather than walking aimlessly alone, we can Fractal Forward(1).
(1) – I know, I know. Corny, but I had to do it. “Awkwardly working in… the movie title“
(2) Image by Wolfgang Beyer under CC BY-SA 3.0
Fractal Forward 