Quote

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

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
Designed
World
Mathematicians
Convenience
Mathematician
Unfortunately

More quotes by 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
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
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
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
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
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
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
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
Image
Engineering is too important to wait for science.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
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
Image
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
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
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Image
Asking the right questions is as important as answering them
Benoit Mandelbrot