Latest Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Together, Steps, Chance

  Source: bigthink.com

• I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Yale, Long, Lists

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Fashion, Risk, Able

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Hands, People, Fields

  Source: bigthink.com

• One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Dream, Long, Together

  Source: bigthink.com

• Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Circles, Shapes, Lines

  Source: bigthink.com

• One couldn't even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn't expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Persistence, Luck, Rewards

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Jobs, Taken, Long

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  World, Littles, Firsts

  Source: bigthink.com

• I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job that I should spend my life in.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Jobs, Way, France

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Uncles, Different, Want

  Source: bigthink.com

• I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Training, Littles, France

  Source: bigthink.com

• In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  School, Numbers, France

  Source: bigthink.com

• I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Dream, Book, Kind

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Simple, Years, Definitions

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  People, Choices, Complicated

  Source: bigthink.com

• Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Past, Impossible, Chaos

  Source: bigthink.com

• I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Two, Half, Shapes

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Strong, Shapes, Chaos

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Simple, Clouds, Views

  Source: bigthink.com

• Many painters had a clear idea of what fractals are. Take a French classic painter named Poussin. Now, he painted beautiful landscapes, completely artificial ones, imaginary landscapes. And how did he choose them? Well, he had the balance of trees, of lawns, of houses in the distance. He had a balance of small objects, big objects, big trees in front and his balance of objects at every scale is what gives to Poussin a special feeling.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Beautiful, Distance, Small Objects

  Source: bigthink.com

• Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Ideas, Roots, Long

  Source: bigthink.com

• The extraordinary fact is that the first idea I had which motivated me, that worked, is conjecture, a mathematical idea which may or may not be true. And that idea is still unproven. It is the foundation, what started me and what everybody failed to **** prove has so far defeated the greatest efforts by experts to be proven.

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Ideas, Effort, Foundation

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Machines, Littles, Helpful

  Source: bigthink.com

• 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

  Source: bigthink.com