“Two roads diverged,” wrote Frost, and the traveller more or less arbitrarily has to choose one. The mathematical line comes later. “Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

Frost is describing here the essence of chaos theory, specifically, the exponential divergence of trajectories. “Way leads on to way” reminds us that the bifurcations will keep coming. The possibilities branch out to almost infinite complexity, doubling at each junction in this rural New England image.

[6 October 2024]