My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
BENOIT MANDELBROTSome 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.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.
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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.
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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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I don’t seek power and do not run around
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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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There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
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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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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
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The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT