Stacey

“For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.”
― Benoît B. Mandelbrot

“(Since algebra derives from the Arabic jabara = to bind together, fractal and algebra are etymological opposites!)”
― Benoît B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

“Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school—squares and cubes and spheres—fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow. “Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost identical at different scales.” “At different scales?” Grant said. “For example,” Malcolm said, “a big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope—it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science