What Kind of Line is This?

This broken line is used to calculate areas. Riemann used it many years ago to define integrals. Calculus concerns itself with change. Small changes when combined are noticeable. Each step may be as little as to be lost to the eye staring on a page. Nevertheless many of them, one after the other, can be indistinguishable to the eye from a straight line that crosses each one symmetrically at half a right angle. It turns out that taking very many steps and looking from afar, the straight line that crosses all of them half way from a right angle, is shorter than taking the steps as shown. If the length of the inclined line is 1.4 units, the sum of all the steps to go from beginning to end, along the crooked line is 2.

What kind of line is this?