Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.

Father was bold, and Mother was cautious. They never shouted at each other but argued constantly about strategy, and they taught me very early that before taking big risks, one must carefully figure the odds.

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.

The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

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

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

I don’t seek power and do not run around.

Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.

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.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

When I first began studying prices, it wasn’t a topic that mathematicians were working on. Purely by accident, I saw a set of data on price changes presented in a lecture and realized they behaved similarly to the geometric models I was already studying.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

Most economists, when modeling market behavior, tend to sweep major fluctuations under the rug and assume they are anomalies. What I have found is that major rises and falls in prices are actually inevitable.

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable

Asking the right questions is as important as answering them

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.

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.

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales…

Order doesn’t come by itself.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don’t believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

Both parents worshiped individual achievement, but because of the Depression and the war, they never achieved what they wanted and deserved. So their ambition and high expectations were transferred to me.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

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.