Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot

Polish-born French and American mathematician and polymath

Alive from: 1924-2010

Category: Science

Quotes 1 till 15 of 30.

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
  Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  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.

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
  Source: Fractals : Form, chance and dimension

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
  Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
  Source: Lecture at the University of Maryland (March 2005)

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
  Source: The Fractal Geometry of Nature

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur.
  Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets Ch. 10, p. 201 (A reference to Genesis 41:48–49,

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
  Source: As quoted in Fractal Finance by Greg Phelan in Yale Economic Review (Fall 2005)

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.
  Source: New Scientist interview

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.

• Benoit Mandelbrot

  

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  My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.