Words matter. These are the best Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
Where do I really belong? I avoid saying everywhere – which switches all too easily to nowhere. Instead, when pressed, I call myself a fractalist.
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
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.
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
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.
Father was bold, and Mother was cautious. They never shouted at each other but argued constantly about strategy, and they taught me very early that before taking big risks, one must carefully figure the odds.
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.
Order doesn’t come by itself.
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Both parents worshiped individual achievement, but because of the Depression and the war, they never achieved what they wanted and deserved. So their ambition and high expectations were transferred to me.
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
When I first began studying prices, it wasn’t a topic that mathematicians were working on. Purely by accident, I saw a set of data on price changes presented in a lecture and realized they behaved similarly to the geometric models I was already studying.
An exquisitely complex shape now known as the Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex object in mathematics.
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
