The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.
BENOIT MANDELBROTThe straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.
BENOIT MANDELBROTI was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
BENOIT MANDELBROTNobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
BENOIT MANDELBROTI 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 MANDELBROTHumanity 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 MANDELBROTSome 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 MANDELBROTBeautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
BENOIT MANDELBROTI didn’t want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure – I wanted to do something different.
BENOIT MANDELBROTIt was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROTOrder doesn’t come by itself.
BENOIT MANDELBROTClouds 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 MANDELBROTThe 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 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.
BENOIT MANDELBROTFor much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
BENOIT MANDELBROTIf you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
BENOIT MANDELBROT