Pattern

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Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. ~ W. Brian Arthur

A pattern is a discernible regularity in the world or in an artificial design. As such, at least some of the elements of a pattern repeat in predictable ways.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A[edit]

If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature. ~ Darren Aronofsky
  • 12:45, Restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

B[edit]

When all factors pertaining to colour and pattern change are considered it is the wide ranging common chameleon Chaamaeleo chamaeleon, that is the most variable of all. More than one hundred colour and pattern variations have been recorded for it. ~ Richard D. Barlett.
A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial. ~ David A. Bednar.
Woman was given to man as an helpmeet. That complementary association is ideally portrayed in the eternal marriage of our first parents - Adam and Eve...Ezra Taft Benson.
  • A cloud does not know why it moves
    in just such a direction
    and at such a speed...It feels an impulsion...
    this is the place to go now.
    But the sky knows the reasons
    and the patterns behind all clouds,
    and you will know, too, when you lift yourself
    high enough to see beyond horizons.
  • However, it is not only the males that use color and pattern to advertise sexuality — and other moods. The colors and patterns of the females are also indicators.
    • Richard D. Barlett (1938), in "Chameleons: Everything about Selection, Care, Nutrition, Diseases, Breeding, and Behavior", p. 35
  • A pattern is a guide or a model. Patterns are used in sewing and knitting, in wood and metalworking, and in a wide variety of other productive pursuits, activities, and jobs. Patterns help to avoid waste and unwanted deviations and facilitate uniformity that is appropriate and beneficial.
  • Woman was given to man as an helpmeet. That complementary association is ideally portrayed in the eternal marriage of our first parents - Adam and Eve. They labored together; they had children together; they prayed together; and they taught their children the gospel together. This is the pattern God would have all righteous men and women imitate.

C[edit]

Patterns permeate nature at all levels of organization. From molecules in a cell to organs in a cell to organs in a body, from animals in a colony to ecosystems in the biosphere, patterns exists everywhere.... ~ Werner Callebaut
I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus. ~ Sydney Carter
  • Patterns permeate nature at all levels of organization. From molecules in a cell to organs in a cell to organs in a body, from animals in a colony to ecosystems in the biosphere, patterns exists everywhere. But patterns are also the realm of art and human enterprise. Thus, we recognize a sense of universality embedded In patterns, which have permeated human culture through an inner necessity to comprehemd natural phenomenon.

D[edit]

E[edit]

F[edit]

Stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. ~ Richard Feynman
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them… ~ George Fox
  • We are born with inherent patterns that are at natural at the invisible forces that shape the spiral of an ocean wave or the symmetry of a pinetree's branches.
  • Deep in the sea
    all molecules repeat
    the patterns of one another
    till complex new ones are formed.

    They make others like themselves
    and a new dance starts.

    Growing in size and complexity
    living things
    masses of atoms
    DNA, protein
    dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

  • The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
  • Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.

G[edit]

H[edit]

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way.
  • A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
  • The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
  • ...regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.

I[edit]

J[edit]

  • I've yet to find the exact word to describe the enjoyment that an evening spent riffling through old pattern books can bring.”
    • Belinda Jeffrey, in One Long Thread, Univ. of Queensland Press, 2012, p. 55

K[edit]

  • A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

L[edit]

The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems. ~ Bruce Lee
  • Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.
  • The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
    • Bruce Lee, as quoted in Striking Thoughts : Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living (2000) edited by John Little, Part I : On First Principles, p. 3

M[edit]

Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity … The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless." ~ Benoît Mandelbrot
'Two-of-something' is just one example of a pattern, a very simple one. We can all think of other patterns, such as 'three-of something', or 'on-top-of-something' or 'bigger-than-something'... - Anthony Mannucci.
  • I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid — a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry — Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity … The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."
    • Benoît Mandelbrot, as quoted in a review of The Fractal Geometry of Nature by J. W. Cannon in The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 91, No. 9 (November 1984), p. 594
  • People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. We descended from those primates who were best at spotting the telltale pattern of a predator in the forest, or of food in the savannah. So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not.
    • Benoît Mandelbrot, in 'The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004) co-written wiith Richard L. Hudson, Ch. 12, p. 245
  • 'Two-of-something' is just one example of a pattern, a very simple one. We can all think of other patterns, such as 'three-of something', or 'on-top-of-something' or 'bigger-than-something'. We all know how this works. The point we don't think about too often that patterns are very real but they are not part of the material world. We forget this, because we usually recognise patterns in connection with objects in the material world. We forget that the patterns themselves transcend the material world. The patterns are not material objects.
  • Pattern is a word that is synonymous with schemas (and their dynamic). They are the customary and often repeated way that a person behaves.
    • Gerald J. Mozdzierz, et al.,, in “Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy: Learning the Essential Domains and Nonlinear Thinking of Master Practitioners”, p. 447

N[edit]

The same gold is fashioned into various articles; just so, the Lord has made the many patterns of the creation. ~ Guru Nanak

O[edit]

P[edit]

Q[edit]

R[edit]

Art is pattern informed by sensibility. ~ Herbert Read.

S[edit]

I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing. ~ William Shakespeare
I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. ~ John Steinbeck
  • Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. We are pattern seeking and pattern-finding animals.
  • When we focus consciously on an object — and create a mental image for example — it's not because the brain pattern is a copy or neural representation of the perceived object, but because the brain experiences a special kind of interaction with that object, preparing the brain to deal with it.
    I maintained that an identical feeling or thought on two separate occasions did not necessarily involve the identical nerve cells each time. Instead, it is the operational impact of the neural activity pattern as a whole that counts, and this depends on context — just as the word "lead" can mean different things, depending on the rest of the sentence.
  • Science traditionally takes the reductionist approach, saying that the collective properties of molecules, or the fundamental units of whatever system you're talking about, are enough to account for all of the system's activity. But this standard approach leaves out one very important additional factor, and that's the spacing and timing of activity — its pattern or form. The components of any system are linked up in different ways, and these possible relationships, especially at the higher levels, are not completely covered by the physical laws for the elementary interactions between atoms and molecules. At some point, the higher properties of the whole begin to take over and govern the fate of its constituents.
    • Roger Wolcott Sperry, in "New Mindset on Consciousness" in Sunrise magazine (December 1987/January 1988)
  • if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.
  • I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

T[edit]

I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me. ~ P. L. Travers
  • Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.
    • Sun Tzu, The Art of War, (6th Century BC).

U[edit]

V[edit]

The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us. - Miroslav Volf.
  • Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
  • I have to say, I grew up with fashion because my mother was a seamstress, and she had an atelier. She would cut the first pattern, and then she had people working for her. So I grew up in an atelier, watching people all around me sewing. I was fascinated.

W[edit]

Dry areas created by global circulation patterns contain most of the deserts on the Earth. The deserts of our world are not restricted by longitude, latitude, or elevation. They occur from areas close to the poles down to areas near the equator. ~ .A.S. Walker
  • Dry areas created by global circulation patterns contain most of the deserts on the Earth. The deserts of our world are not restricted by longitude, latitude, or elevation. They occur from areas close to the poles down to areas near the equator. … Deserts are not confined to earth. The atmospheric circulation patterns of other terrestrial planets with gaseous envelopes also depend on the rotation of those planets, the tilts of their axes, their distances from the Sun and the composition and density of their atmospheres. Except for the poles the entire surface of Mars is a desert. Venus may also support deserts .

X[edit]

Y[edit]

Z[edit]

External links[edit]

  • Encyclopedic article on Pattern on Wikipedia
  • The dictionary definition of pattern on Wiktionary
  • Media related to Patterns on Wikimedia Commons