Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician 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". He 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...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth20 November 1924
CountryFrance
If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
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.
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere
Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
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.
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
I don't seek power and do not run around
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.
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.
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.
Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which are singularities, but some shapes in nature are so complicated that they are equally complicated at the big scale and come closer and closer and they don't become any less complicated.