Top 69 Mandelbrot Quotes
#1. It can be argued that the mathematics behind these images [of the orbit diagram for quadratic functions and the Mandelbrot set] is even prettier than the pictures themselves.
Robert L. Devaney
#2. Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.
Poul Anderson
#3. Mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.
James Gleick
#4. When we talk about the impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, [Mandelbrot] is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years.
Heinz-Otto Peitgen
#5. The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#6. The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#7. Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.
James Gleick
#8. The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.
John Allen Paulos
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#14. I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#15. In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#16. Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#17. 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
#18. 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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#19. Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#20. 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
#21. Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#22. Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#23. Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#29. 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
#30. There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#31. A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#33. An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#34. The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#35. 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
#37. Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#38. There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#42. I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#43. 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
#44. For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#45. 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
#46. Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#47. If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#48. 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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#52. Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#53. Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#54. Too often, an event's importance is not recognized until it is too late for proper recording.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
#55. For a thinking person, the most serious mental illness is not being sure of who you are.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
#56. For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#58. The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#59. I found myself in the position of that child in a story who noticed a bit of string and - out of curiosity - pulled on it to discover that it was just the tip of a very long and increasingly thick string...and kept bringing out wonders beyond reckoning
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
#60. My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back, I see a pattern.
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
#64. Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#69. 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.
Benoit Mandelbrot
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