A Quote by Ron Eglash

$Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry. — © Ron Eglash$

Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.

Ron Eglash

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Could Geometry Impossible Infinity Invent Mathematicians Thought Until Using

Quote Author

Ron Eglash
American - Scientist
Born: December 25, 1958

I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.

Benoit Mandelbrot

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Benoit Mandelbrot

God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

Gian-Carlo Rota

You existed. You existed now as a fractal. Definition: A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal. Maybe we were all fractals.

David Levithan

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

James Gleick

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal.

Margot Lee Shetterly

While fractal geometry is often used in high-tech science, its patterns are surprisingly common in traditional African designs.

Ron Eglash

One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

Benoit Mandelbrot

The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

Dave Barry

Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.

Ron Eglash

Africans sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred or their clamor for an invincible Savior, so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. After that dance the stars weren't little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.

Lamin Sanneh

Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.