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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.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Miracle Simple Spring
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

Able Colossal Fashion Kind Rewarded Risk
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Asking Important Questions Right
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Country Jobs Professor Realized Satisfactory Way
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Powerful Science Tool
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Clouds Looks Smooth
$Benoit Mandelbrot Quote - I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.$

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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Half Shapes Two
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Clouds Simple Views
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Branches Color Thinking
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Choices Discipline Intellectual
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Luck Persistence Reward
The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set … is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as ‘chaos’.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Chaos Mankind Mathematics
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Interest Life Thing Wanted
Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Pleasure Realizing Years
$Benoit Mandelbrot Quote - When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.$

When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Field Hands People
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Deny Everywhere Roughness

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 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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Popular Authors

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