Benoît Mandelbrot quotes - page 3

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. (Benoît Mandelbrot)
The word fractal, once introduced, had an extraordinary integrating effect upon myself and upon many people around. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
Here is the curious thing: the first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it. It was as if somehow I had seen it before. Of course I hadn't. No one had seen it. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time. For much of my life, however, there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
When you seek some unspecified and hidden property, you don't want extraneous complexity to interfere. In order to achieve homogeneity, I decided to make the motion end where it had started. The resulting motion biting its own tail created a distinctive new shape I call Brownian cluster. ... Today, after the fact, the boundary of Brownian motion might be billed as a "natural" concept. But yesterday this concept had not occurred to anyone. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
How could it be that the same technique applies to the Internet, the weather and the stock market? Why, without particularly trying, am I touching so many different aspects of many different things? View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
For many years I had been hearing the comment that fractals make beautiful pictures, but are pretty useless. I was irritated because important applications always take some time to be revealed. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. (Benoît Mandelbrot)
After having coined this word I sorted my own research over a very long period of time and I realised that I had been doing almost nothing else in my life. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
The thought that one unifying idea should continue forever is simply not realistic and therefore not to be hoped for. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
The extraordinary surprise that my first pictures provoked is unlikely to be continued. Many people saw them fifteen years ago, ten years ago. Now children see it on their computers when the computers do nothing else. The surprise is not there. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
The next thing which surprised us very much, is that both for Julia sets and even more so for the Mandelbrot set, the complication was not, how to say, arbitrary, and almost everybody found the impression that these shapes were hauntingly beautiful. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
A complicated phenomenon need not be fractal, but finding that a phenomenon is "not even fractal" is bad news, because so far nobody has invested anywhere near my effort in identifying and creating new techniques valid beyond fractals. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
I don't seek power and do not run around. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
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. (Benoît Mandelbrot)
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
For many years I had been hearing the comment that fractals make beautiful pictures, but are pretty useless. I was irritated because important applications always take some time to be revealed. For fractals, it turned out that we didn't have to wait very long. In pure science, fads come and go. To influence basic big-budget industry takes longer, but hopefully also lasts longer. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot
There is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set. ... Its astounding complication was completely out of proportion with what I was expecting. Here is the curious thing: the first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it. It was as if somehow I had seen it before. Of course I hadn't. No one had seen it. No one had described it. The fact that a certain aspect of its mathematical nature remains mysterious, despite hundreds of brilliant people working on it, is the icing on the cake to me. View quote
Benoît Mandelbrot