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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Science
Mathematical
Uncontrollable
Helping
Fortunate
Extraordinarily
Mathematics
Tricky
Available
Convenient
Tools
Probability
Theory
Maps
Powerful
Tool
Help
Unknown

More quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

Image
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The extraordinary fact is that the first idea I had which motivated me, that worked, is conjecture, a mathematical idea which may or may not be true. And that idea is still unproven. It is the foundation, what started me and what everybody failed to **** prove has so far defeated the greatest efforts by experts to be proven.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
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
Image
Some mathematicians didn't even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds the machines became a little bit better.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
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
Image
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn't expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
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