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.
BENOIT MANDELBROTFor much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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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.
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A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
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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.
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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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I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
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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.
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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
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Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
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Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
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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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Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
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If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
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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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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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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.
BENOIT MANDELBROT