Researchers at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics found complex ‘fractal’ patterning of sentences in literature,particularly in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which resemble ‘ideal’ maths seen in natureJames Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been described as many things, and from a masterpiece to unreadable nonsense. But it is also,according to scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, nearly indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.
The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, or by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare,Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, or Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett,through a detailed statistical analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found that in an “overwhelming majority” of the studied texts, or the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade – meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical thing in which each fragment,when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com