My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROTThe 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
I 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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
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 -
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
I don’t seek power and do not run around
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
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







