"A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales [...]" (Benoît Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", 1982)
"A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension." (Benoît Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature", 1982)
"In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity." (James Gleick, "Chaos: Making a New Science, A Geometry of Nature", 1987)
"One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them [...] these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension - between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see - is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain - or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create? - are the ones found in the world around us." (John Barnes, "Mother of Storms", 1994)
"We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. [...] Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level." (Alan Moore, [interview], 1998)
"If financial markets aren't efficient, then what are they? According to the 'fractal market hypothesis', they are highly unstable dynamic systems that generate stock prices which appear random, but behind which lie deterministic patterns." (Steve Keen, "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences", 2001)
"Do I claim that everything that is not smooth is fractal? That fractals suffice to solve every problem of science? Not in the least. What I'm asserting very strongly is that, when some real thing is found to be un-smooth, the next mathematical model to try is fractal or multi-fractal. A complicated phenomenon need not be fractal, but finding that a phenomenon is 'not even fractal' is bad news, because so far nobody has invested anywhere near my effort in identifying and creating new techniques valid beyond fractals. Since roughness is everywhere, fractals - although they do not apply to everything - are present everywhere. And very often the same techniques apply in areas that, by every other account except geometric structure, are separate." (Benoît Mandelbrot, "A Theory of Roughness", 2004)
"Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish. This threshold line, that edge between anarchy and frozen rigidity, is not a like a fence line, it is a fractal line; it possesses nonlinearity." (Stephen H Buhner, "Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth", 2014)
[fractal:] "A fragmented geometric shape that can be split up into secondary pieces, each of which is approximately a smaller replica of the whole, the phenomenon commonly known as self similarity." (Khondekar et al, "Soft Computing Based Statistical Time Series Analysis, Characterization of Chaos Theory, and Theory of Fractals", 2013)
"If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal." (Benoît Mandelbrot)
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