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 MANDELBROTMy 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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Humanity 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 MANDELBROT -
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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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.
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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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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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Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
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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 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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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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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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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
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For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
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Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
BENOIT MANDELBROT