Hell Week by Rosemary Clement-Moore

it. "This is a fractal design."

    "A fractal! I couldn't place it." My moment of clarity was short. "But that's math, not chemistry."

    "Well, it's both," she said. "You can create fractals by putting a solution of copper sulfate between two glass plates and applying voltage . . ."

    I know my eyes must have glazed over. "And in non- geek?"

    She started again. "Basically--and I'm really oversimpli- fying here--a fractal is a system of illustrating things that cannot be described with normal geometry. Tree branches and snowflakes and the stock market. Things that seem ran- dom, but if looked at in a mathematical way, aren't really."

    "Like chaos theory."

    "Right."

    All I knew about chaos theory came from watching Juras- sic Park, but I didn't mention that.

    Dr. Smyth laid her hand on the printout. "Most people see fractals in computer graphics. Pretty pictures made out of irrational numbers."

    "Irrational numbers," I echoed. "Like pi."

    "And phi." She was into it now, like a kid showing off a favorite toy. "Phi--1.618--called the Golden Mean or some- times the Divine Proportion. Grossly oversimplified, it means that the sum of a plus b is to a as a is to b."

    "Um. I left my math brain in calculus. Can you translate?"

    "All that's important is the proportion." She drew two equal squares touching, and then on top of it drew one rec- tangle that was equal in size to the two squares. Then she drew another rectangle that was equal in size to the first three put together. Then another, et cetera, until she had a diagram that looked like a stack of blocks.

    "These rectangles are all in the `divine' proportion," she said. "The Parthenon and the Great Pyramid at Giza were both built incorporating this ratio. It's been shown to be universally pleasing to the eye."

    "Okay." I took her word for it, not least because it reso- nated in my memory.

    "But watch this." She drew a curved line connecting all the corners of the progressively larger rectangles, until she had a spiral that looked familiar.

    "That's a nautilus shell."

    "And a cochlea." She tapped her ear, and I remembered that little shell thingy responsible for hearing from high school biology. "And even . . ." She drew a parallel spiral and connected the two with hastily drawn lines, like a ladder.

    "DNA?"

    "Subtly, but yes." She turned the paper back over and tapped the design from the computer. "Fractals. A pattern that repeats with self-symmetry to an infinitely small, or infinitely large scale."

    I stared at her, a little helplessly. "You realize I have no idea what this means."

    Dr. Smyth sat back in her chair. "It means that if you look at things from a certain perspective--in this case mathematically--there is nothing truly random in the uni- verse."

    "You couldn't have just said that?"

    She grinned and handed me the paper. "What kind of educator would I be?" I thanked her, promised she'd see me, eventually, for a class, and left. I wasn't sure I had any answers, but I defi- nitely had more questions.

    The first was why had this design popped up, twice, on my Internet browser.

    And theoretically, if seemingly random events were mathematically not really random, then didn't it follow that if you changed the math of things, you could change the out- come?

    I suddenly had a new appreciation for arithmetic. I guess I was going to have to start paying attention in calculus. 10

    The campus of Bedivere U. is tree-shaded and quaint, full of redbrick colonial revival buildings on an unregimented layout. The buildings went up gradually over the last cen- tury, wherever was convenient or empty. It lent the campus a lot of charm, but made learning your way around, espe- cially when you had back-to-back classes on opposite sides of the campus, a little challenging.

    I'd grown up here, more or less. The two places I could find with my eyes closed were the library and Webster Hall, which housed the history department and archives. My father's office was on the third