Photographies of stock markets

Micheal Najjar's The Down Jones, from 1980 to 2009. Najjar drew an analogy between geologic structures and a social one, the stock market. As Mandelbrot have argued for a long time, financial markets movement are wild and cannot be captured by the Bell curve.  The fluctuations of markets, like the irregular shorelines of the English coast, are both better described by fractal geometry, which Mandelbrot invented.

As we have allegedly entered the anthropocene, and although is it a geological concept that signals that humans now shape the earth, is it interesting to note the parallel with financial math that were once extracted from markets, but which is now shaping it in the form of algorithms. For a 15 minutes talk about how algorithms influence our lives, listen to Kevin Slavin at TED.