Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes
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Engineering is too important to wait for science.
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Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
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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).
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Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
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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.
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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.
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Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
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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.
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The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
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Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
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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.
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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
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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.
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I don't seek power and do not run around