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Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph. Linear relationships are easy to think about....Linear equations are solvable... Linear systems have an important modular virtue: you can take them apart, and put them together again — the pieces add up.

— James Gleick p. 23 as cited in: James R. Hansen (2004)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Hanssen commented: "Following distinctions between linear and nonlinear systems from James Gleick's 1987 book on chaos theory may be helpful."

More quotes by James Gleick

Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of controllable measurement process; chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.

Chaotic theory is mathematically based on non-linear propositions, "meaning that they expressed relationships that were not strictly proportional. Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph"

p. 23 as cited in John A. Rush (1996)

Amid the vast modern network of universities, corporate laboratories, and national science foundations has arisen an awareness that the best financed and best organized of research enterprises have not learned to engender, perhaps not even to recognize, world-tuning originality.

James Gleick (1992)

Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.

James Gleick (2002)

In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Gleick (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.