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

Benoit Mandelbrot

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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
Facts
Undertook
Fully
Fate
Understood
Fact

More quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

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Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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
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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
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The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
Benoit Mandelbrot
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A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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
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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
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A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
Benoit Mandelbrot
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For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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
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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
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I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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Engineering is too important to wait for science.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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