Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot

Polish-born French and American mathematician and polymath

Lived from: 1924 - 2010

Category: Scientists

Born: 20 november 1924 Died: 15 october 2010

Quotes 1 till 20 of 30.

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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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  • A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...
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  • A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
    Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature
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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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  • An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
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  • Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
    Source: Fractals : Form, chance and dimension
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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.
    Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature
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  • For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
    Source: Lecture at the University of Maryland (March 2005)
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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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  • Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
    Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature
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  • Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.
    Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets Ch. 10, p. 201 (A reference to Genesis 41:48–49,
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  • If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
    Source: As quoted in Fractal Finance by Greg Phelan in Yale Economic Review (Fall 2005)
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  • In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.
    Source: New Scientist interview
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  • Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.
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  • My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
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  • My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.
    Source: New Scientist interview
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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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  • People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. We descended from those primates who were best at spotting the telltale pattern of a predator in the forest, or of food in the savannah. So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not.
    Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets Ch. 12, p. 245
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  • Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
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  • The Mandelbrot set covers a small space yet carries a large number of different implications. Is it a fitting epitaph? Absolutely.
    Source: New Scientist interview
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