Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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My ambition was not to create a new field, but I would have welcomed a permanent group of people having interests close to mine and therefore breaking the disastrous tendency towards increasingly well-defined fields. Unfortunately, I failed on this essential point, very badly. Order doesn't come by itself.
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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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Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.
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For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
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Georg Cantor claimed the essence of mathematics lies in its freedom. But mathematicians do not pick problems from thin air for the pleasure of solving them. To the contrary, a mark of greatness resides in the ability to identify the most interesting problems in the framework of what is already known.
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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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A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...
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The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.
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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.
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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 and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.
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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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I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
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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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There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
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Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.
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Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
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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.
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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
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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 by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines
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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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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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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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Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.