Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to. Benoit Mandelbrot More Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot More Quotes From Benoit Mandelbrot There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time. Benoit Mandelbrot pieces nice needs Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals. Benoit Mandelbrot fractals damn beautiful Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines. Benoit Mandelbrot discipline sports science An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something. Benoit Mandelbrot arrogance claims firsts For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself. Benoit Mandelbrot baffled my-own persons 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 Benoit Mandelbrot news pieces memories I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I will tell, the advent of the computer, not as a computer but as a drawing machine, was for me a major event in my life. That's why I was motivated to participate in the birth of computer graphics, because for me computer graphics was a way of extending my hand, extending it and being able to draw things which my hand by itself, and the hands of nobody else before, would not have been able to represent. Benoit Mandelbrot asking-questions drawing hands If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in. Benoit Mandelbrot details airplane looks 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 chance together steps My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept. Benoit Mandelbrot choices complicated people When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one. Benoit Mandelbrot fields hands people If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future). Benoit Mandelbrot nature science past 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 long-ago years ideas Asking the right questions is as important as answering them Benoit Mandelbrot asking-the-right-questions important asking Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory. Benoit Mandelbrot ivory-tower towers important I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit. Benoit Mandelbrot names latin order Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere Benoit Mandelbrot roughness deny It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way. Benoit Mandelbrot taken jobs long 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. Benoit Mandelbrot chaos shapes strong My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact. Benoit Mandelbrot understood fate facts
