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Home
Authors
Benoit Mandelbrot
French
Mathematician
About the author
Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Rest
#Beginning
#Mathematicians
Order doesn't come by itself.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Order
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.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Weather
#Rules
#Laws
#Physics
Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Years
#Today
#Popular
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Physics
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Time
#Right
#Work
#Saying
#Needs
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Will
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Weather
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#First
#Present
#Arrogance
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Will
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,
French
Mathematician
#Time
#Now
#Years
#Pleasure
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,
French
Mathematician
#Memory
#Computer
#News
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Life
#Interest
I don't seek power and do not run around.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Power
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit Mandelbrot,
French
Mathematician
#Fact
#Fate
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,
French
Mathematician
#Clouds