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 MANDELBROTMy fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
More Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
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Some mathematicians didn’t even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.
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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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Order doesn’t come by itself.
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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 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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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.
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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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In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
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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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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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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 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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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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Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
BENOIT MANDELBROT