Nonlinear Quotes & Sayings

The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitalization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. — Pearl Zhu

All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." "Okay," Gennaro said. "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're hard to solve - in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. — Michael Crichton

I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now. — Phil Knight

The digital capability is modular, dynamic, and nonlinear, having many visible and invisible business elements, for improving organizational competency, and enabling business strategy. — Pearl Zhu

One of the ideas of this book is to give the reader a possibility to develop
problem-solving skills using both systems, to solve various nonlinear
PDEs in both systems. To achieve equal results in both systems, it is not sufficient simply "to translate" one code to another code. There are numerous examples, where there exists some predefined function in one system and does not exist in another. Therefore, to get equal results
in both systems, it is necessary to define new functions knowing the method or algorithm of calculation. — Inna K. Shingareva

Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein's relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It's somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself. — Kip S. Thorne

Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor. — Ashley Montagu

IN CHAOS THEORY, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT IS THE SENSITIVE DEPENDENCY ON INITIAL CONDITIONS IN WHICH A SMALL CHANGE AT ONE PLACE IN A DETERMINISTIC NONLINEAR SYSTEM CAN RESULT IN LARGE DIFFERENCES IN A LATER STATE. — Teresa Mummert

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. — Murray Gell-Mann

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. — Tom Robbins

Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It's now become a very broad theory that's been used to study everything from the stock market to heart rhythms. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability. — Michael Crichton

And even if we make good plans based on the best information available at the time and people do exactly what we plan, the effects of our actions may not be the ones we wanted because the environment is nonlinear and hence is fundamentally unpredictable. As time passes the situation will change, chance events will occur, other agents such as customers or competitors will take actions of their own, and we will find that what we do is only one factor among several which create a new situation. — Stephen Bungay

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable. — Michael Shermer

To grasp organizational life as it is, read novels (!) ... It is my fervent belief that we will never design rational processes that "overcome" such irregularities-don't bother telling that to a consultant. Hence, we should embrace the real, nonrational, nonlinear world with vigor and glee-and develop enterprise and career strategies accordingly. — Tom Peters

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals. — James Gleick

Motivation is a fine example of social complexity. It is nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable. It cannot be defined or modeled with a single diagram. — Jurgen Appelo

Synergistic convergence is the most important idea we have at our disposal to prevent collapse scenarios and move forward in a nonlinear manner toward an evolutionary society. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

Complex systems are full of interdependencies - hard to detect - and nonlinear responses. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In the real, physical world or business world, most relationships are nonlinear. — Pearl Zhu

The plumbing and pluvial dynamics of the Amazon, the largest freshwater system on Earth, are still far from understood. This is partly because it is a semi-open system. Moisture flows in and out unpredictably. A lot of nonlinear feedback loops and 'remote influences' - continental, transcontinental, oceanic, meteorological - come into play. — Alex Shoumatoff

Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world. — Carl Woese

Utilizing a nonlinear approach and companion competencies makes it possible for people to move from good performance to great. — John H. Zenger

Their incredible determination creates the need for nonlinear thinking, combined with boundless energy. Champions also earn money in nonlinear ways. While the masses essentially trade their time for money, the great ones realize this is probably the worst way to acquire wealth. Using — Steve Siebold

In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way
as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career
the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was. — Douglas Adams

Create a Chocolate Factory There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls - a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That's what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts — John Medina

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops. — Alex Shoumatoff

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly. — Gregory Benford

Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work. — Biz Stone

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line. — Dean Kamen

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. — Neil Gershenfeld

There are challenges in terms of the measurement of VAR for what are known as nonlinear derivatives, where things like gamma and vega are important dimensions of the risk. — John Hull

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented - one that computer scientists haven't come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address - a page number - for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up - or doesn't - when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly. — Joshua Foer

In America's 'nonlinear war', with no frontline or clear political or territorial goals, the number of enemy killed apparently revealed who was 'winning'. 'The military kill' became 'the prime target, simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance'. — Paul Ham

Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition. — Murray Gell-Mann

Nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging. — John Henry Holland