David Levithan Quotes

If you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet - go ahead and do that now - and relax your hand, you'll see a crinkle, and then a wrinkle within the crinkle, and a crinkle within the wrinkle. Right? Your body is covered with fractals.

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.

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.

Every you, every me. Fractals. Fractures.

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.

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.

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.

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

Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

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

When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

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.

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.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

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.

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.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

Maybe relationships could have fractals, too. And maybe the sense of loss was when you're becoming a fractal of what you once were to each other.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.