The art and science of formal classification owes its origin to the great philosopher Aristotle, who conceived of a conceptual tree whose trunk and branches denote different divisions of ontology, hierarchies of being, logical and natural relations, etc. This tree metaphor became ubiquitous until very recently. It's been used to map historical and genealogical changes and hierarchies among subjects ranging from family blood lines to languages,
the history of religious evolution, biological taxonomies, scientific branches, corporate maps, etc.
Darwin, of course, famously used such a tree to explain his idea of
common ancestry.Helpful as it's been, and given current levels of computational power, the traditional genealogical tree may no longer be the most useful took for mapping out various sorts of relationships. In the following fascinating
RSA Animate presentation, Manuel Lima explores the power of network visualization.
That blithely romanticized ending didn't quite do it for me, but the entire presentation did get me thinking about
the mathematical explanatory power of fractals...
