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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.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Memories News Pieces Somewhere
If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Lines Looks Shapes Straight
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
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
Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Produce See Thinking Took
Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Engineering May Science
Order doesn’t come by itself.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Come Itself Order
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 MANDELBROT

Choices Complicated People
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
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
I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist’s life in France.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

France Littles Training
Engineering is too important to wait for science.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Engineering Important Waiting
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

Lying Mountain Nature Science Tree
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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT

Lines Pieces Self
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

Firsts Littles Mathematician Pure World
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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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