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.
BENOIT MANDELBROTBeautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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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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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Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
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The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
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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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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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Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.
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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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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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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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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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The 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.
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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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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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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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT







