Mandelbrot Quotes
One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in ten. But the basic conjecture, despite heroic efforts rewarded by two Fields Medals, remains a conjecture, now called MLC: the Mandelbrot Set is locally connected. The notion that these conjectures might have been reached by pure thought - with no picture - is simply inconceivable.
Benoît Mandelbrot
If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals...) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body... it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world...
John D. Barrow
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.
Benoît Mandelbrot
