In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals.” “An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obey such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels. The academics write in their paper that: “Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum … involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences.” You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. I am making an engine with only one wheel. In a letter about the novel, Work in Progess as he then knew it, he told Harriet Weaver: “I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. Joyce himself, reported to have said he wrote Finnegans Wake “to keep the critics busy for 300 years”, might have predicted this. The horizontal axis represents the degree of singularity, while the vertical axis shows the spectrum of singularity. Multifractal analysis of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: the graph shape is virtually indistinguishable from the results for purely mathematical multifractals. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” said Professor Stanisław Drożdż, another author of the paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal Information Sciences. “The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world James Joyce Finnegans Wake, the scientists found, was the most complex of all. Some works, however, were more mathematically complex than others, with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex, comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal,” said Dr Paweł Oświęcimka from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the new paper Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-range Correlations in Narrative Texts. Some were more expressive – here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out – others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French 17th-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. “All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organisation of the lengths of sentences. Fractals are used in science to model structures that contain re-occurring patterns, including snowflakes and galaxies.
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