Top 7 Quotes by Neil Gershenfeld

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

People, Giving, Design

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

Weakness, Process, Findings

"We must learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers" by Alok Jha, www.theguardian.com. January 15, 2011.

The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.

Neil Gershenfeld

Real, Opportunity, Design

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

Smart, Technology, Needs

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

Neil Gershenfeld

Simple, Technique, Facts

"When Things Start to Think". Book by Neil Gershenfeld, www.cnn.com. 1998.

There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

Neil Gershenfeld

Jeans, People, Car