Thinking in the ragged gap between Yes and No

Benoît Mandelbrot has died at the age of 85.

Not a bad knock.

I honour him for the gift he gave me of fractal geometry.

Fractal geometry was one of the things that changed how I thought about the world.

I used to think the universe followed simple rules simply and therefore everything was a soluble if you understood the rules and had a good enough model.

Two things excited me about fractals. 

 I liked the idea of self-similarity. Once I the had the idea that some objects seen at one magnification look much the same when viewed at any other magnification I began to see examples all over the place. Road networks, trees, river systems, the examples are all round us.

Most important for me was the idea that simple rules could give rise to very complex situations and that it was often difficult to tell in advance if a point was inside a set or not. This was a crucial change for me in the way I thought about the world. If the simple parts can give rise to complex wholes and the margin between In and Out, between Yes and No is very, very, very fine.

This, combined with the fact that the margin of error for measurement is often big enough to change the outcome, gives rise to Chaos and this makes the world much more interesting and the tools we need to understand it much more subtle.

We are guessing when we try and manipulate complex systems and complex systems are all about us. We may avoid some traps for unwary if we approach systems thinking they be complex and very difficult to understand or manipulate. We are thinking in the ragged gap between Yes and No.

Also, complex systems are much more beautiful then Newtonian mechanism, no matter the familiar allegiance to the latter.

The world is much more complex than it first appear and sometimes you have get right into the detail and sometimes you have to stand right back.