Ron Eglash

Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.

If you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet - go ahead and do that now - and relax your hand, you'll see a crinkle, and then a wrinkle within the crinkle, and a crinkle within the wrinkle. Right? Your body is covered with fractals.

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities - powerful new tools like African fractals - and then just get out of the way.

Fractal geometry is everywhere, even in lines drawn in the sand. It's the cycle of life... You see fractals in plants, in flowers. Within the human lung are branches within branches.

While fractal geometry is often used in high-tech science, its patterns are surprisingly common in traditional African designs.

My assumption was that all indigenous architecture would be more fractal. My reasoning was that all indigenous architecture tends to be organized from the bottom up. As it turns out, though, my reasoning was wrong.

There is no singular 'reason' why Africans use fractals, any more than a singular reason why Americans like rock music. Such enormous cultural practices just cover too much social terrain.