|
I came across this very interesting article regarding fractal structures in classical literature and thought I'd pass it along. - R
Scientists find evidence of mathematical structures in classic books
 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake has been described as many things, from a masterpiece to unreadable nonsense. But it is also, according to scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, almost indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal. The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, 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, the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade - meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole.
Fractals are used in science to model structures that contain re-occurring patterns, including snowflakes and galaxies. "All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organisation of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive - here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out - others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French 17th-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal," said Dr Paweł Oświęcimka from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the new paper Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-range Correlations in Narrative Texts. Some works, however, were more mathematically complex than others, with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex, comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. Finnegans Wake, the scientists found, was the most complex of all.
Article Continues Here
| 
Re: Mathematical Structures in Classical Books
Comments rated to be "almost" Good Answers: