Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
-
Engineering is too important to wait for science.
-
I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.
-
The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.
-
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
-
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
-
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
-
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.
-
Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.
-
If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).
-
Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
-
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
-
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.
-
The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
-
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I don't seek power and do not run around
-
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.
-
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market