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 MANDELBROTWhy 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
-
-
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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 -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Order doesn’t come by itself.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Round 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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
It 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 MANDELBROT -
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Engineering is too important to wait for science.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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 MANDELBROT