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Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I will tell, the advent of the computer, not as a computer but as a drawing machine, was for me a major event in my life. That's why I was motivated to participate in the birth of computer graphics, because for me computer graphics was a way of extending my hand, extending it and being able to draw things which my hand by itself, and the hands of nobody else before, would not have been able to represent.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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 coastline or a tree.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
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. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.
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 only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
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 close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
Benoit Mandelbrot -
My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
I don't seek power and do not run around
Benoit Mandelbrot -
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
Benoit Mandelbrot -
It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
Benoit Mandelbrot