My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROTThe rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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I’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.
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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.
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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
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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
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A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales…
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I don’t seek power and do not run around
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If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.
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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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The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.
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One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.
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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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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.
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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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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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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