Stephen Wolfram
British-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, writer and businessman (born 1959)
Benoit B. Mandelbrotwas a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as “the art of roughness” of physical phenomena and “the uncontrolled element in life”. He referred to himself as a “fractalist” and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word “fractal”, as well as developing a theory of “roughness and self-similarity” in nature.
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About the Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrotwas a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as “the art of roughness” of physical phenomena and “the uncontrolled element in life”. He referred to himself as a “fractalist” and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word “fractal”, as well as developing a theory of “roughness and self-similarity” in nature.
In 1936, at the age of 11, Mandelbrot and his family emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, to France. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and in the United States and receiving a master’s degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.
Because of his access to IBM’s computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1980. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be “rough”, a “mess”, or “chaotic”, such as clouds or shorelines, actually had a “degree of order”. His math- and geometry-centered research included contributions to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy, and the social sciences.
Toward the end of his career, he was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale’s history to receive tenure.
Mandelbrot also held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Universite Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During his career, he received over 15 honorary doctorates and served on many science journals, along with winning numerous awards. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, was published posthumously in 2012.
18 Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot
- 1.
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 2.
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 MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 3.
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 4.
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 MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 5.
Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 6.
I don’t seek power and do not run around.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 7.
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 8.
Order doesn’t come by itself.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 9.
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 10.
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 MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 11.
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 12.
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 13.
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 14.
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 MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 15.
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 16.
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 17.
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 MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician
- 18.
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
Benoit MandelbrotPolish-born, French and American mathematician