“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.”
Hanssen commented: "Following distinctions between linear and nonlinear systems from James Gleick's 1987 book on chaos theory may be helpful."
Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 23 as cited in: James R. Hansen (2004), Trees of Texas: An Easy Guide to Leaf Identification, p. 246
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
James Gleick 15
American author, journalist, and biographer 1954Related quotes

“Effort and results do not share a linear relationship.”
Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Twitter
Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 128; As cited in: Prices Revalued as Information: Circuit Elements, online document 2013

1005.52 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s10/p0520.html#1005.50
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Perspective of clouds, p. 96
Part I, Chapter 5, Mechanistic Modelling, p. 108
The Death of Economics (1994)

R. Frisch (1964), Theory of Production, p. v: Lead paragraph of preface
1940-60s
Context: In this feverish world of ours, where one wants the economic analyses to produce easily understandable results quickly and at the least possible cost, some of us have fallen into the habit of assuming for simplicity that the hundreds sometimes thousands of variables that enter into the analyses are linked together by very simple relationships. Frequently we even go so far as to assume linear relationships. Only in this way have we been able to feed our problems into the electronic computers and get mechanical answers quickly and at low cost.