Dr. Belinda Arkwright, Chair Emerita of Anomalous Geography, recorded the following seven-part lecture series during the 10th Annual Conference on Recursive Teleology.
Here’s where things got delightfully unruly. Fractals. In the 20th century, a chap named Benoit Mandelbrot poked a stick at the idea of measuring coastlines. He wrote a book called How Long is the Coast of Britian. A perfectly reasonable question disguised as a major existential crisis. The book did not answer the question. Instead, it reinforced the creeping suspicion that the Enlightenment had underestimated the true gravity of mountain ranges.
Mandelbrot discovered… wait for it… that the smaller your measuring stick, the longer the coastline got. I know. It’s almost French in its defiance.
This, dear students, is when humanity realized nature wasn’t messy. It was meticulous in a language we hadn’t bothered to learn. Fractals revealed that mountains, trees, clouds, and yes, even bureaucratic delays, all possess self-similar complexity. We didn’t just discover structure. We realized most things are simply repeating patterns.
Mathematically speaking, it was a revelation. Philo-cartographically, it was a catastrophe. Suddenly, all our tidy maps had edges that refused to behave. Topographical maps started crying in their drawers. Navigation software developed low self-esteem. Geologists took up poetry.
And before you ask, Milo, yes, someone did try to use fractals to model the queue system at Lunar Passport Control. They are still in therapy.
Anyway, with fractal geometry in the folds of our maps, we finally had a tool to model terrain that resisted being flat. We could render complexity without smoothing it. It was the end of innocence and the beginning of the ‘zoom in, forever’ era. Cartography became, if you’ll pardon the term, a recursive art form. And just like most recursive art, it was beautiful, complicated, and slightly repellent if stared at too long.