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A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

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
Fractal
Fractals
Infinity
Seeing
Way

More quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

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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
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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
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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
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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
Benoit Mandelbrot
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I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
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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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
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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
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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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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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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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Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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
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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
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I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job that I should spend my life in.
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
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There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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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
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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