The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
BENOIT MANDELBROTI spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
-
-
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Some mathematicians didn’t even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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).
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
BENOIT MANDELBROT







