From a distinguished historian of modern America comes a surprising work of scientific storytelling that wanders the threshold between order and chaos. Fractals in Twilight traces how self-similar patterns—from the ragged edge of the North Sea coastline to the branching of bronchioles in a human lung—became a language for understanding complexity in nature, cities, and culture. Beginning with Benoît Mandelbrot's years at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights and his studies of cotton prices, James T. Patterson follows a lineage that includes Gaston Julia, D'Arcy Thompson, and Mitchell Feigenbaum, connecting chalkboard equations to fieldwork in the Namib Desert, lidar scans of the Amazon Basin, and electron micrographs in Santiago Ramón y Cajal's archives.
Rather than separating mathematics from history, the narrative shows how institutions, wars, and technologies shaped the rise of fractal thinking: Cold War mainframes, satellite constellations like Landsat and Sentinel-2, the personal computer revolution from the Apple II to the modern GPU, and the open-source libraries that let students render a Julia set on a phone. Case studies range from river deltas near Dhaka to lightning scars in the Sandia Mountains, from coral reef die-offs mapped near Palau to the power-law geometry of cities such as Lagos, Tokyo, and São Paulo.
Patterson also asks what twilight we are entering as machine learning and synthetic biology let us not only see patterns but produce them: generative models that hallucinate coastlines, CRISPR-driven morphogenesis in organoids, and market microstructures tuned by high-frequency algorithms. What might it mean to design a storm, a forest, or a lung? Featuring 42 photographs, 8 maps, and 31 diagrams—including a foldout of the Mandelbrot set and time-lapse sequences from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array—this lucid, provocative book invites readers to reconsider scale, agency, and risk on a planet whose most revealing truths repeat, with variation, at dusk.
