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 MANDELBROTRound 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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 had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.
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I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
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My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
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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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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist’s life in France.
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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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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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A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales…
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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.
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There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
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Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.
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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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT







