Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Benoit Mandelbrot
Age: 85 †
Born: 1924
Born: November 20
Died: 2010
Died: October 14
Computer Scientist
Economist
Engineer
Mathematician
Professor
Scientist
Writer
Warszawa
Mandelbrot
B. B.
Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Theory
Maps
Powerful
Tool
Help
Unknown
Science
Mathematical
Uncontrollable
Helping
Fortunate
Extraordinarily
Mathematics
Tricky
Available
Convenient
Tools
Probability
More quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
One couldn't even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn't expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.
Benoit Mandelbrot
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
Benoit Mandelbrot
The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
Benoit Mandelbrot
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit Mandelbrot
The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.
Benoit Mandelbrot
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which are singularities, but some shapes in nature are so complicated that they are equally complicated at the big scale and come closer and closer and they don't become any less complicated.
Benoit Mandelbrot
I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.
Benoit Mandelbrot
I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.
Benoit Mandelbrot
I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.
Benoit Mandelbrot
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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
