Ron Eglash Quotes

The universe is fractal. The closer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes.

An exquisitely complex shape now known as the Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex object in mathematics.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

All created forms are fractal, as is their purpose, use, and allotted time for existence.

It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.

The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.

I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.

Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which are singularities, but some shapes in nature are so complicated that they are equally complicated at the big scale and come closer and closer and they don't become any less complicated.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

You existed. You existed now as a fractal. Definition: A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal. Maybe we were all fractals.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

I just toured around looking for fractals, and when I found something that had a scaling geometry, I would ask the folks what was going on - why they had made it that way.

While fractal geometry is often used in high-tech science, its patterns are surprisingly common in traditional African designs.

Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

Architecture is a code. It's a pure code, derived from the dimensions of nature.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

History is fractal. The closer you look, the more complicated, yet always repeating patterns.