The Mandelbrot Set And Narnia

The Mandelbrot Set

What struck me was how in C.S. Lewis’s final book for Narnia, there was something very much like the Mandelbrot set.

I won’t quote the entire chapter but here are the highlights:

“Come further up, come further in!”

…

“Further up and further in!” roared the Unicorn, and no one held back.

…

“Welcome, in the Lion’s name. Come further up and further in.”

…

About half an hour later—or it might have been half a hundred years later, for time there is not like time here—Lucy stood with her dear friend, her oldest Narnian friend, the Faun Tumnus, looking down over the wall of that garden, and seeing all Narnia spread out below. But when you looked down you found that this hill was much higher than you had thought: it sank down with shining cliffs, thousands of feet below them and trees in that lower world looked no bigger than grains of green salt. Then she turned inward again and stood with her back to the wall and looked at the garden.

“I see,” she said at last, thoughtfully. “I see now. This garden is like the Stable. It is far bigger inside than it was outside.”

“Of course, Daughter of Eve,” said the Faun. “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”

…

“That country and this country—all the real countries—are only spurs jutting out from the great mountains of Aslan. We have only to walk along the ridge, upward and inward, till it joins on. And listen! There is King Frank’s horn: we must all go up.”

…

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.


Lewis wrote this in 1956, Mandelbrot consolidated hundreds of years of somewhat esoteric mathematical thinking and theory into the word ‘fractal’ in 1975, and he didn’t discover his famous Mandelbrot set until 1980.