Richard Preston Quotes

Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.

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.

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.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

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.

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.

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

Fractal geometry is everywhere, even in lines drawn in the sand. It's the cycle of life... You see fractals in plants, in flowers. Within the human lung are branches within branches.

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

But if you're looking to be spooked by really tall trees then you've got to go to Washington State.

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

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

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

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.

The fact is I'm very self-similar.

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

If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.

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.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

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.

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.