Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way.

Order doesn't come by itself.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

Asking the right questions is as important as answering them

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.

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 settled disciplines.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

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.

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.

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.

If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job that I should spend my life in.

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

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.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.