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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

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

Helpful Littles Machines
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
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
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
BENOIT MANDELBROT

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

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

Claims Hammers Use
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Interest Life Thing Wanted
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Facts Fate Understood
Engineering is too important to wait for science.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Engineering Important Waiting
Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Lying Mountain Nature Science Tree
A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Complexity Formulas Simple
Self-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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Case Dull Self Shape Shapes
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
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Complex Far Away Shapes
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Miracle Simple Spring
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

Circles Clouds Mountain

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

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