James Gleick Quote

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most...

Maths is at only one remove from magic.

The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is o...

[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.

A circle has no end.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little spa...