Ron Eglash

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

My assumption was that all indigenous architecture would be more fractal. My reasoning was that all indigenous architecture tends to be organized from the bottom up. As it turns out, though, my reasoning was wrong.

When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet.