Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.
BENOIT MANDELBROTUnfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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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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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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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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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
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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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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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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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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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I don’t seek power and do not run around
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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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The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
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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 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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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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Engineering is too important to wait for science.
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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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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.
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A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
BENOIT MANDELBROT