"Why is geometry often described as ""cold" and ""dry?" One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, o… - Benoit Mandelbrot

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Weierstrass, Cantor, or Peano! In physics, an analogous development threatened since about 1800, since Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics avoided all illustration. And it is exemplified by the statement by P. A. M. Dirac (in the preface of his 1930 Quantum Mechanics) that nature’s “fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.” The wide and uncritical acceptance of this view has become destructive. In particular, in the theory of fractals “to see is to believe.

If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.

The thought that one unifying idea should continue forever is simply not realistic and therefore not to be hoped for, but I think that for quite a number of years still, perhaps if I am lucky to the end of my life, because I would hate to see that stop in my lifetime, those questions will become very active and still somewhat separate, as different branches of learning become accustomed to them. I cannot imagine that this idea would vanish, not because I am so proud of what I've been doing all my life, but because this is not an artificial thought coming from nowhere in no time and vanishing again rapidly in no time. It has in every one of its manifestations profound roots in the history of the various sciences and the various manners of human enterprise and those roots will not be broken. The continuity of these thoughts will continue, and if any substitute comes, if any other name comes, which is possible, the ideas will remain.