An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
BENOIT MANDELBROTI’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
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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.
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There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
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I 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.
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I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
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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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In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
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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).
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When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.
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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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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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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.
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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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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.
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My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROT