series of Pollocks and found that the paintings were indeed fractal. It
was a little like discovering your favorite aunt speaks a secret, ancient
language. “Pollock painted nature’s fractals twenty-five years ahead
of their scientific discovery!” He published the finding in the journal
Nature in 1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics.
Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term “fractal” in 1975,
discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of
things that looked visually complex or chaotic. As he proved, fractal
patterns were often found in nature’s roughness—in clouds,
coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile
River, and in the clustering of galaxies. To understand fractal patterns
at different scales, picture a trunk of a tree and a branch: they might
contain the same angles as that same branch and a smaller branch, as
well as the converging veins of the leaf on that branch. And so on.
You can have fractals within chaos, or you can have fractals creating
what looks like chaos. When I look at the equations describing these
relationships, my eyeballs spin, but to a mathematician they are clear,
consistent and beautiful. Arthur C. Clarke described the Mandelbrot
set (a beetlelike drawing that illustrates these equations) as being
“one of the most astonishing discoveries in the entire history of
mathematics.”
Although true fractal patterns occur quite commonly in
landscapes, in space and in living creatures, even potato mold, they
are rare in abstract art. So rare that when a trove of previously
unknown paintings was discovered in a storage locker belonging to a
family friend of Pollock’s in 2002, Taylor was called in to verify their
authenticity. There was much at stake. If the paintings were really
Pollocks, they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Taylor’s
computer analysis showed the paintings did not in fact exhibit
Pollock’s signature fractal geometry. The physicist concluded they
were fake. It was a bold and controversial assessment, but later
validated when chemical analysis proved some of the paints were