If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
BENOIT MANDELBROTI conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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 or a tree.
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The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.
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I didn’t want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure – I wanted to do something different.
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If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).
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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.
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I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not – for the job that I should spend my life in.
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If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.
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Order doesn’t come by itself.
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I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
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When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.
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A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
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In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
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One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.
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Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills
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I don’t seek power and do not run around
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My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.
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A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.
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Engineering is too important to wait for science.
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There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
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My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
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A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.
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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
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Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
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