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
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
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.
I don't seek power and do not run around
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable
There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
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.
A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.
Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.
Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. 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... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
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.