A Fractal Is A Way Of Seeing

I Spent Half My Life, Roughly Speaking, Doing The Study Of Nature In Many Aspects And Half Of My Life Studying Completely Artificial Shapes. And The Two Are Extraordinarily Close; In One Way Both Are Fractal.

If You Look At Coastlines, If You Look At That Them From Far Away, From An Airplane, Well, You Don't See Details, You See A Certain Complication. When You Come Closer, The Complication Becomes More Local, But Again Continues. And Come Closer And Closer And Closer, The Coastline Becomes Longer And Longer And Longer Because It Has More Detail Entering In.

The Existence Of These Patterns [fractals] Challenges Us To Study Forms That Euclid Leaves Aside As Being Formless, To Investigate The Morphology Of The Amorphous. Mathematicians Have Disdained This Challenge, However, And Have Increasingly Chosen To Flee From Nature By Devising Theories Unrelated To Anything We Can See Or Feel.

The Rare Scholars Who Are Nomads-by-choice Are Essential To The Intellectual Welfare Of The Settled Disciplines.

The Theory Of Probability Is The Only Mathematical Tool Available To Help Map The Unknown And The Uncontrollable. It Is Fortunate That This Tool, While Tricky, Is Extraordinarily Powerful And Convenient.