Fractals 101

The Great Raymondo has a strange relationship with mathematics. Like a Monet painting, it only really makes sense to me when I keep my distance from it. In high school, I always wished maths lessons were like trivia sessions, and that a student could observe the world’s intricate patterns as if they were simply paintings in an art gallery, without the bother of graph paper.


I wanted Mr Ball to simply stand in front of the class and say "the two short sides of a right angled triangle add up to the longer side" and "A square always has 360 degrees in its corners", and that it would be okay for me to simply say 'Well, isn't that odd, this is a fascinating world we live in isn't it?', write the fact down in a notebook and walk out with a new appreciation of the balance and sense within nature, feeling more at one with the cosmos and all the better for it. I never understood the need to get one's hands dirty with it, to draw triangles again and again with a blunt pencil to prove, like our parents before us, what humanity has known for thousands of years: that Pythagoras was right on the button. To the miniature Great Raymondo, there was only a point in applying maths if there was a real likelihood that Louise Arundell, on the back row of a classroom in Byrchall High School, Wigan was suddenly going to shout 'Hang on a minute, this triangle has 179 degrees in its corners!' and thus make history. The doing of maths seemed needless, and sort of ruined the fun.


Which is why it is so great to not be in school anymore. As soon as I left, I slipped into a pleasant, distant, dreamy relationship with the subject. When working on the checkouts in Asda, I would gaze face down into the scanning device and marvel at the geometric symmetry of the beams and mirrors (I was only disciplined for this once).


Nowadays, I can watch documentaries about infinity, think, 'monkeys on typewriters, eh?', store the snippet 'infinity plus one is still infinity' in a drawer in my mind labelled 'for use in Ship and Mitre pub quiz', and leave it at that. I can admire the Escher drawings on my flatmate's wall, think 'I bet he got through a few rulers in his career' and move on to asking her if she wants a cuppa. And when Victor tells me to blog about fractals, I can look the word up on Wikipedia, discover it is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," and i can pass my time on my library desk slot by thinking up things in my own life which might be considered fractals : Music. Trees. Bars of Dairy Milk. My Father and Me (sort of)... and then deliver the lesson 'Fractals 101' to my lovely readers. Trust the Great Raymondo on this... with maths, ‘101' is all you need. (Any comments from colleagues on recent till errors are hereby unwelcome).

Great Raymondo and her Dad : a sort of fractal.