Scientists find evidence of

mathematical structures in classic

books
Researchers at Polands Institute of Nuclear Physics found complex fractal
patterning of sentences in literature, particularly in James Joyces Finnegans
Wake, which resemble ideal maths seen in nature

Capturing scientists imaginations ... James Joyce in Paris in 1937.

Photograph: Josef Breitenbach/PA
Alison Flood
Wednesday 27 January 2016 16.45 GMTLast modified on Wednesday
27 January 201616.54 GMT
James Joyces Finnegans Wake has been described as many things,
from a masterpiece to unreadable nonsense. But it is also, according to
scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, almost
indistinguishable in its structure from a purely
mathematical multifractal.
The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors
from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas
Mann, Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett, through a detailed statistical

analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found
that in an overwhelming majority of the studied texts, the
correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the
dynamics of a cascade meaning that their construction is a fractal: a
mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a
structure resembling the whole.
Fractals are used in science to model structures that contain reoccurring patterns, including snowflakes and galaxies.
All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of
organisation of the lengths of sentences. 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. However, correlations were
evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal,
said Dr Pawe Owicimka 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 works, however, were more mathematically complex than others,
with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex,
comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. Finnegans Wake,
the scientists found, was the most complex of all.
I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world
James Joyce

The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text
are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical
multifractals, said Professor Stanisaw Drod, another author of the
paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal
Information Sciences.

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Multifractal analysis of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: the graph shape is virtually
indistinguishable from the results for purely mathematical multifractals. The horizontal
axis represents the degree of singularity, while the vertical axis shows the spectrum of
singularity. Photograph: IFJ PAN

Joyce himself, reported to have said he wrote Finnegans Wake to keep

the critics busy for 300 years, might have predicted this. 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. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making
an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a
perfect square. You see what Im driving at, dont 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. No, its a wheel, I tell the
world. And its all square.
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.
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. In addition, they
appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven
sets of fractals called multifractals.

Sequences of sentence lengths (as measured by number of words) in four books,

representative of various degrees of cascading character. Photograph: IFJ PAN

The other works most comparable to multifractals, the academics

found, were A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave
Eggers, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, The USA trilogy by John Dos
Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolao and
Joyces Ulysses. Marcel Prousts la recherche du temps perdu showed
little correlation to multifractality, however; nor did Ayn Rands Atlas
Shrugged.

The academics note that fractality of a literary text will in practice

never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics, because a
mathematical fractal can be magnified to infinite, while the number of
sentences in a book are finite.
It is not entirely clear whether stream-of-consciousness writing
actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the
imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work
to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective,
said Drod, suggesting that the scientists work may someday help in
a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.
Drod suggested today that the findings could also be used to posit
that writers uncovered fractals and even multifractals in nature long
before scientists. Evidently, they (like Joyce) had a kind of intuition,
as it happens to great artists, that such a narrative mode best reflects
how nature works and they properly encoded this into their texts, he
said. Nature evolves through cascades and thus arranges fractally, and
imprints of this we find in the sentence-length variability.
Eimear McBride, whose multiple award-winning debut novel A Girl is a
Half-Formed Thing is written in a stream-of-consciousness style, said
she wasnt taken aback by the results.
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It doesnt surprise me that works described as stream of
consciousness appear to be the most fractal. By its nature, such
writing is concerned not only with the usual load-bearing aspects of
language content, meaning, aesthetics, etc but engages with
language as the object in itself, using the re-forming of its rules to give
the reader a more prismatic understanding of the subject at hand.
Given the long-established connection between beauty and symmetry,
finding works of literature fractally quantifiable seems perfectly
reasonable.
But she added that she couldnt help being somewhat disappointed by
the idea that the main upshot of this research may be to make the
assigning of genre more straightforward.

Surely there are more interesting questions about the how and why of
writers brains arriving at these complex, but seemingly instinctive,
fractals? she said. And, given Professor Drods pretty inarguable
contention that it remains unclear whether or not stream-ofconsciousness writing does indeed reveal a deeper layer of
consciousness, what distance this research may go to explain why some
readers believe themselves to be experiencing exactly that while others
have the opposite reaction?