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TIL the cracks in old paint on my ceiling follow the same branching rules as river deltas and lightning
I was up on a ladder patching a ceiling in a house from 1921 when I noticed the crack pattern looked weirdly familiar. So I took a photo and later found out that a math teacher named Benoit Mandelbrot wrote a whole paper in 1967 called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?' about exactly this kind of shape. Turns out cracks, deltas, trees, and lightning all follow the same branching math, and there are even fractal dimension numbers for each one. The folds in your brain sit around 2.79 on that scale, which is why a flat photo of a cracked wall can look like a coastline from above. I know this sounds like a stretch, but next time you see a spider crack in a sidewalk, crouch down and really look at it. It goes from one line to two to four to eight, then the pieces get too small to follow. Has anyone else caught a pattern like this in something totally normal and then gone down a rabbit hole trying to name it?
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