Chaos of Lifelines
Digital Print
2021
This image is made from individual curve segments, where the distances between the endpoints in each of the segments are randomly drawn from a distribution of ages at the time of death in the USA during 2007, resulting in a rough visual representation of the lengths of lives.
Here 2200 roughly linear lifelines are placed at random. The viewer is
invited to reflect on the question To what extent does randomness and chaos rule our lives?
Background and Inspiration
I first explored the idea of using curves of random length to represent lives for the December 2019 issue of Mathematics Magazine. This is another image in that series.