Customer Reviews

African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design

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This book starts out with a presentation of fractal geometry which is very comprehensible and enjoyable. Next it covers specific aspects of fractal geometry and their relation to African society, architecture, fashion, art, divination and games. This part of the book is very fascinating. I learned a lot about how recursion works and how it is used in African buildings and fashions in the chapter on recursion. Other chapters in this section are Geometric algorithms, Scaling, Numeric systems, Infinity and Complexity. They are all very interesting. The final section is on the implications of the fact that Africans used this kind of mathematics. The author emphasizes the application of African fractal geometry to education especially the education of African Americans who sometimes feel alienated from math classes which focus on the achievements of European peoples. One thing that the author stresses is that the fractal designs of, say city planning, made by African peoples are not more "natural" than the Western approach of dividing cities into rectangles. He says this assumption dovetails into a preconception of African societies as being somehow closer to nature and therefore unsophisticated. The author points out that fractal mathematics is hardly simple and also not easily intuited either. I did not find myself making this assumption but apparently some people do fall into this trap. Anyway, I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting an introduction, with applications, to fractal geometry and its use in African societies. I also recommend this book to educators looking for a way to get their students, regardless of their background, to be more interested in mathematics.

This is a brilliant book. As an Architect, I was truly enlightened by the idea of the 'other' culture(s), having a valid scientific basis in fact. I was always told in Architectural school that the 'Africans',(including those in the diaspora) were a peoples without and writing systems, technological background and no culture. I'm glad to see evidence that this is not the truth. I thank the author for his contribution.

I had Ron Eglash as a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Discussing and analyzing aspects of this book, including self-organization in general, was very interesting and valuable to say the least. The book makes no assumptions in knowledge and will cleanly bring in the topic of fractals in african culture. I had read the book the winter break before taking the course and had no difficulty understanding the material even as a freshman. The concept is quite intriguing and shatters many of the held perceptions of "the hierarchy of mathematics." Ron Eglash is a great man and I know he loves talking with people that share similar interests in mathematics or cybernetics.

This is a brilliant book. As an Architect, I was truly enlightened by the idea of the 'other' culture(s), having a valid scientific basis in fact. I was always told in Architectural school that the 'Africans',(including those in the diaspora) were a peoples without and writing systems, technological background and no culture. I'm glad to see evidence that this is not the truth. I thank the author for his contribution.

Ron Eglash's brilliant work on Afrikan fractals helps to shatter long-held myths and misconceptions about Afrikans, the most pervasive and pernicious of which is the notion of Afrikans (both on the Motherland and in the Diaspora) as inactive agents in history. This work motivated me to complete mine on chaos theory and Afrikan fractals. My longer reviews of Eglash's book appear in the Nexus Network Journal (vol. 2, 2000:165-168) and the Journal of Third World Studies (vol. xviii, no. 1, 2001:237-239), each reflecting the publication's genre and disciplinary focus. Dr. Abdul Karim Bangura is a researcher-in-residence at the Center for Global Peace and a professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at American University, and the director of The African Institution in Washington, DC. He is the author of 21 books and more than 200 scholarly articles.

This is an amazing book! It clearly shows how many of the common things that people of African descent do have may scientific connections. Hair styles that are worn today by people of African descent, have been worn as far back to the ancient indigenous Africans known as the ancient Egyptians. So it really no surprise that there is mathematical and scientific knowledge being found today by scientist and scholars.

This book should be in every school and home in this country. I take that back, this book should be in every school globally.

Another scientific book that would make a great set for any school or home is, The African Unconscious. Written by Edward Bruce Bynum. You can find it here on Amazon.com.

This book fundamentally changed the way I view the world -- from its emphasis on geometry to its rejection of linear ways of thinking. It is hard to understand everything that Eglash is arguing and even harder to review perceptively. However, it is an amazing read.

This book can be placed in the category of ethnomathematics, where the emphasis is on the ethno rather than the mathematics. Fractals are by definition structures that are self-similar over a large number of iterations and scales of measure. If you accept that only a few iterations are sufficient to define a fractal, then the structures described in this book can be considered fractals. However, the author does the best job of summing up the content in the first two sentences of chapter 11.

"Parts I and II of this book emphasized the geometric, symbolic, and quantitative aspects of African fractals. Some cases were more speculative than others - a difference that I hope was clearly indicated - but even in the use of mythic narrative, I generally restrained conclusions to those that had geometric or quantitative counterparts."

I agree that the author generally stayed within the bounds of reasonableness in describing what are called fractal structures in African design, but only if you stay within the bounds of a few iterations of shrinking self-similarity being sufficient to have a structure be considered a fractal.
In the last four chapters, the author makes some points that are both revealing and questionable. On page 182, after pointing out that anthropologists need years of study to understand a culture the author states, "My thin description fieldwork lasted only a year and moved through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Cameroon, Benin and Ghana." By his own admission, Eglash is not qualified to speak to deep cultural issues, yet he proceeds to do so. The section that begins on page 209 with the title "Recursion and sex - a cross-cultural comparison" simply went way beyond or more precisely out of my understanding of fractals, recursion and sex. I did not understand either the statement "This section will focus on the relation between recursion in mathematics and sexuality in culture" or the purported explanation.
While I am a strong supporter of the concept of ethnomathematics, people writing in support of it must take great care not to avoid finding mathematical ideas or intent inside situations where none exist. In my opinion, Eglash crosses that line in this book.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission,