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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
Way
Fractal
Fractals
Infinity
Seeing

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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
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Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
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
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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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For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
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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Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
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