A KAIST professor reflects on how nature’s repeating patterns illuminate the ties between individuals, society and gratitude ahead of the Chuseok holiday.
Mandelbrot set. Initial image of a zoom sequence: Mandelbrot set with continuously colored environment. Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3.WIKIPEDIA
Park Kyung-ryul
The author is a professor at the KAIST Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy.
As a child, I often indulged in a favorite fantasy. I would imagine traveling beyond the sky overhead, leaving Earth and the solar system behind. Hundreds of billions of stars shine in our galaxy alone, with countless other galaxies beyond it. What would lie at the very end of the universe?
Then I would reverse direction and travel endlessly inward, into my own body: past the cells that make up our organs, through molecules and atoms and down into the nucleus. Could another universe open somewhere in those remote depths and somehow lead back to our galaxy? It was a fanciful curiosity that the two paths, outward and inward, might eventually meet like a Möbius strip.
Years later, I learned about a structure called a fractal. It is a beautiful pattern found in nature, in which similar forms repeat across scales and remain connected. Mountain ranges, coastlines and branching rivers seen from the sky bear a striking resemblance to blood vessels, the bronchi of the lungs and the veins of a tiny leaf. Though different in scale, they all carry life and energy to their furthest reaches, creating similar patterns throughout nature.
The Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot called these patterns fractals. They offer a new way to imagine relationships in the world: The part resembles the whole and the whole resides within the part. Individual human beings, each a small universe, form families and communities, then nations and ultimately humanity. Nothing exists entirely alone. Individual choices reshape society, while changes in institutions and technology reach back into individual lives.
Perhaps what repeats across different scales is not so much shape as relationship. I am part of a larger whole, and within me are the lives of countless others. We are not isolated points but pieces of a fractal, connected and reflecting one another.
Just as leaf veins carry water to every edge, small acts of consideration in daily life can reach another person and help shape the landscape of an era. Even the smallest gesture can become part of a pattern extending far beyond ourselves. Chuseok holiday is approaching. It is a time to express gratitude to those we appreciate and look again toward those nearby whom we may have overlooked.
My childhood fantasy was not literally true. Yet it still offers me a window through which to see the world anew.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
