Symmetry… Interesting thoughts on symmetry from Matthew May:
…Most people think about symmetry in terms of a mirror reflection, which is a visual left-right balance. But that’s just one example of a kind of symmetry, of which there are many. In fact, most of the natural world is symmetrical, characterized by infinitely repeating patterns. So the best way to think about symmetry is the way Hermann Weyl defined it in his 1952 book, Symmetry: “A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.” Symmetry is about dynamic properties of ordering, organizing, and operating. And that places the concept in the manager’s world.
When we construct hierarchical organizational charts, we are trying to achieve a certain intuitive symmetry, a fractal. The term fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoit Mandelbrot, at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, applying mathematics to problems of economics, finance, and information technology. Fractals are known as the “fingerprint of nature,” and are a special type of symmetry: repetitive patterns nested within each other that remain the same at differing scale of magnification, so that the overall structure is similar to a single smaller structure. The most important thing for a manager to realize is that fractals occur naturally and arise out of extremely simple rules that when fed back on each other create beautifully organized and highly complex designs…
(Image from my sketchbook from 2006.)
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