How Great is Great Britain?
It sounds like the sort of question that should have a straightforward answer. Surely someone, at some point, has walked around Britain with a very long tape measure and worked it out.
Useful takeaways from this story.
It sounds like the sort of question that should have a straightforward answer.
Surely someone, at some point, has walked around Britain with a very long tape measure and worked it out.
The problem is that Britain's coast is full of bays, headlands, inlets and innumerable little squiggly bits.
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The useful part
It sounds like the sort of question that should have a straightforward answer. Surely someone, at some point, has walked around Britain with a very long tape measure and worked it out. The problem is that Britain's coast is full of bays, headlands, inlets and innumerable little squiggly bits.
How it works
- Measure it using a fairly large ruler and you'll skip over much of that detail.
- Use a smaller ruler and suddenly you're measuring around all those extra twists and turns.
- This is the Coastline Paradox: the awkward fact that there isn't really one definitive answer to the question.
- In 1967, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot famously explored exactly this problem in his paper.
- His attempts to understand why coastlines reveal ever more complexity the more closely you examine them helped popularize the idea of fractals.
What to take from it
and Britain's coastline mysteriously gets longer. shapes and patterns whose complexity can continue to emerge at different scales. Coastal Paradox lets you explore this geographical and mathematical conundrum for yourself.
Details worth keeping
Unfortunately, the coastline has other ideas.
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