Benoit Mandelbrot

I don't seek power and do not run around

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Order doesn't come by itself.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

— Benoit Mandelbrot

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory

— Benoit Mandelbrot

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Where do I really belong? I avoid saying everywhere - which switches all too easily to nowhere. Instead, when pressed, I call…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid-a term used in this work to…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud,…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Asking the right questions is as important as answering them

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

— Benoit Mandelbrot