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 MANDELBROTSelf-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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.
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For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
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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.
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Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
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Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
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If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
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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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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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An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
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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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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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The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
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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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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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I didn’t feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.
BENOIT MANDELBROT