Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

53 quotes in 606 categories

• 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…
• Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition…
• I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular…
• The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous.…
• 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…
• 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…
• My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
• The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
• 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.
• The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
• Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
• When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations…
• Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
• The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
• There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
• Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory
• Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
• 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…
• I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
• I don't seek power and do not run around

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