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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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
Benoit Mandelbrot -
The Mandelbrot set covers a small space yet carries a large number of different implications. Is it a fitting epitaph? Absolutely.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot