The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
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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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
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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 -
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
I 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 MANDELBROT -
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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 MANDELBROT -
I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist’s life in France.
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 -
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
BENOIT MANDELBROT -
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).
BENOIT MANDELBROT