the.com/coastline paradox
the ruler you use decides how long the beach is.
means a coastline's measured length grows the finer your ruler gets, because it has no fixed, well-defined length at all.
from formalized by mathematician benoit mandelbrot in his 1967 paper how long is the coast of britain, building on lewis fry richardson's observation that neighboring countries reported wildly different shared-border lengths.
richardson effectspain and portugal once disagreed on their border by 20%
fractal dimensionbritain's coast scores roughly 1.25, between line and plane
limitmeasured length can rise toward infinity as scale shrinks
born frommandelbrot's paper helped launch fractal geometry itself