Fractal Worlds Quotes

“I found I missed the compelling riddle-like quality of especially tricky math problems, that tight flourish of logic unfolding step by step. This is probably the same quality that also attracts me to particularly tricky poems. In both cases, a sense of wonder animates the premise: how can these constructed symbols mean something true about the world?”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined

“Words are important, but not just as signifiers of ideas; they have their own rhythm, their own layering; pages sprinkled with hundreds of tiny mirrors, reflecting one another and bits of the world.”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined

“Much of our intellectual development is the story of how we learn to sort impressions: self or environment, rocks, trees, clouds, books, cats. It is a story of how we learn to judge and recognize colors, numbers, shapes, and abstract concepts. When we learn a new category, our internal model of the world rotates - often slightly, occasionally more.... Some shifts are emotional: holding a newborn in your hands and understanding just what a rich and varied life will come to this tiny seed of an individual, looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing a kinship despite having traveled very different evolutionary paths. Some shifts are abstract: learning the crystalline pure beauty of a geometric proof's logic. Fractal geometry also represents a shift, both emotional and abstract...”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined