In ancient African lore, technological knowledge was held sacred for a reason: it was realized that human ingenuity came with the risk of running foul of the laws of nature. If you feel more comfortable with a mathematical approach to understanding this, here it is.

There’s a MarveloUs talk on TED(technology, entertainment, design) at www.ted.com by ethno mathematician Ron Eglash, who traveled around Africa courtesy of Fulbright exploring fractal designs in indigenous architecture. Looking at aerial photos of African settlements, he noticed patterns repeating on ever-shrinking scales: circles of circular houses, rectangles inside rectangles, and streets branching like trees. Eglash confirmed his visual intuition by calculating the geometry of the arrangements in the photos – they were indeed fractal. “From a European point of view, that may look like chaos, but from a mathematical view it’s the chaos of chaos theory – it’s fractal geometry.”