I don’t seek power and do not run around
BENOIT MANDELBROTThe 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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Some mathematicians didn’t even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.
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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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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
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A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.
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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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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.
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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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There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
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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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My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
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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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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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I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
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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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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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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.
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The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set … is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as ‘chaos’.
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There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
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I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.
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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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If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
BENOIT MANDELBROT