Ethnomathematics

John Gruber sent me an amazing TED talk about fractals in African societies – how they occur in both pre-colonial architecture as well as religious ritual in addition to the natural world. The most stunning part of all of this is that the fractal iterations of Bamana sand divination, a seemingly innocuous superstition, is in fact the unappreciated precursor to… well, I’ll let Ron Eglash tell you. The connections between past and present, the “primitive” and modern, are there whether we choose to acknowledge them or not; and moreover, human nature itself is uniform and unchanged by time. Where we were once captivated, terrified and reverent of the infinite, we remain so, still trying to conquer the limitations of our own comprehension.