Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Wanted
Uncles
Matter
Mathematician
Different
Pure
Something
Knew
Fact
Facts
Didn
Become
Uncle
More quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot
There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
Benoit Mandelbrot
The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
Benoit Mandelbrot
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
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics
Benoit Mandelbrot
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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
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
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
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
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
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
The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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
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
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit Mandelbrot
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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