hyphae by Yr Helyg

"The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined. The understanding of nature's complexity awaited a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of a lightning bolt's path, for example, was not the straight line denoting its direction, but rather the distribution of its zigs and zags. Mandelbrot, beginning three decades ago, has dusted off some obscure mathematics that now illuminate these special kinds of complexity. He makes a claim about the world, and the claim is that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles may be more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidean geometry. They may be the keys to the essence of a thing."
James Gleick, 1985