Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.
Interpretation
Geometry is often seen as a rigid discipline that struggles to capture the complexity of natural forms.
In this quote, Benoit Mandelbrot highlights the limitations of geometry as a mathematical tool that can accurately depict the irregular and intricate shapes found in nature. He suggests that while geometry provides valuable structural insights, its inherent abstraction fails to encapsulate the fluidity and variability present in organic forms such as clouds and trees.
In practice
In a lecture on the limitations of mathematical models in describing natural phenomena.
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.
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.
There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.
All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.
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