Word: fractal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cool water gardens, the arcaded patios, the fractal-like proliferation of detail in the stucco domes, the mind-defeating intricacy of the mosaics with their cordons de la eternidad (literally, "ribbons of eternity") interlacing in continuous patterns: such things cannot be crated, shipped across the Atlantic and put in a museum. One fragment of a 14th century mosaic dado from the Alhambra, however beautiful, is only a detail and cannot convey the overwhelming effect of the patterning on the palace's actual walls. Thus, although this exhibition looks fine inside the pyramid of the Met's Lehman Pavilion...
Nonetheless, Penrose's reasoning is powerful, and he delves extensively into such heavy topics as fractal geometry, number theory, quantum physics, entropy and cosmology to give readers the necessary background to understand his ideas. "I have to admit," he says, "that I had been looking for an excuse to write about many aspects of physics and mathematics anyway, and this gave...
History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes...
...mind is the grandest, most mysterious fractal. It takes its shape from what it holds, and therefore, Zen-like, sometimes grows more graceful because of what it has kept...