I didn't put his name up here my colleague, Kerry, in Kenya, has come up with this great idea for using fractal structure for postal address in villages that have fractal structure, because if you try to impose a grid structure postal system on a fractal village, it doesn't quite fit.

I saw this diagram drawn by a French architect, and I thought, Wow! What a beautiful fractal!

A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

So they're mapping the social scaling onto the geometric scaling it's a conscious pattern. It is not unconscious like a termite mound fractal.

The first pictures of this fractal were drawn in 1978 by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski as part of a study of Kleinian groups.

Now, after I did the simulation, I realized the whole village kind of spirals around, just like this, and here's that replicating line a self replicating line that unfolds into the fractal.

So I tracked down one of the folks who makes these things, this guy in Mali just outside of Bamako, and I asked him, How come you're making fractal fences? Because nobody else is.

At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.

'I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.' That is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families he met while researching the fractal patterns he d noticed in villages across the continent.

And in fact, what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish, and they're in violent motion.

If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does that could be a seat for a chair it could be a sole for a sports shoe it could be a car blending into seats.

And so I finally got to this city, and I'd done a little fractal model for the city just to see how it would sort of unfold but when I got there, I got to the palace of the chief, and my French is not very good I said something like, I am a mathematician and I would like to stand on your roof.