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Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Benoit Mandelbrot

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

Memories News Pieces Somewhere
Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Engineering May Science
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Fashion Happen Mathematics Strong
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Complex Far Away Shapes
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

Helpful Littles Machines
A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Complexity Formulas Simple
$Benoit Mandelbrot Quote - If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.$

If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Claims Hammers Use
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

Firsts Littles Mathematician Pure World
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Choices Complicated People
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Facts Fate Understood
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Choices Discipline Intellectual
In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Definitions Simple Years
The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Chance Steps Together
In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Country Numbers Problem School
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

Nature Past Science
$Benoit Mandelbrot Quote - I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.$

I 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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Half Shapes Two

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

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Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

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Popular Authors

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