Life is fractal, but markets are square
I think about squares often, well rectangles really.  Practically everything I see is a rectangle.  I go to a rectangular building and poke little rectangles to fill my rectangular screen with glyphs bounded by rectangles and tesselating on the screen like rectangles would--and I see it all through my rectangular glasses. Why?<p>Well, recycles tesselate--so that&#x27;s one property that rules out pentagons, say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons?<p>This question, I think, is similar to another one: why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Is there something more human about right angles than some other one? (look up the playfair&#x27;s axiom, you&#x27;ll see the angles I&#x27;m taking about)<p>It&#x27;s everywhere. Prime numbers are those special ones that can&#x27;t be expressed as a rectangle of dots on the page.  Why do we define multiplication this way?<p>Is there something perhaps arbitrary and anthropocentric in our preference for right angles? If so it would explain why the distribution of the primes is so unpredictable.<p>I think it is because we live at the bottom of a gravity well and have an adaptation (building things) which makes that matter.<p>I also think that if we could rid our mathematics of that bias, it would sort of trickle up into other domains and allow our constructs to take on more richness, like you see in the fractal side of the fractal vs rectangle images presented in the article.