Benoît Mandelbrot: Import

Benoît Mandelbrot was Polish-born, French and American mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on import.
Benoît Mandelbrot: 112   quotes 2   likes

“So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 12, p. 245
Context: People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved. We descended from those primates who were best at spotting the telltale pattern of a predator in the forest, or of food in the savannah. So important is this skill that we apply it everywhere, warranted or not.

“For many years I had been hearing the comment that fractals make beautiful pictures, but are pretty useless. I was irritated because important applications always take some time to be revealed.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

A Theory of Roughness (2004)
Context: For many years I had been hearing the comment that fractals make beautiful pictures, but are pretty useless. I was irritated because important applications always take some time to be revealed. For fractals, it turned out that we didn't have to wait very long. In pure science, fads come and go. To influence basic big-budget industry takes longer, but hopefully also lasts longer.

Beauty , Time

“He insisted that it was important to learn Julia's work and he pushed me hard to understand how equations behave when you iterate them rather than solve them.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)
Context: The Mandelbrot set is the modern development of a theory developed independently in 1918 by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou. Julia wrote an enormous book — several hundred pages long — and was very hostile to his rival Fatou. That killed the subject for 60 years because nobody had a clue how to go beyond them. My uncle didn't know either, but he said it was the most beautiful problem imaginable and that it was a shame to neglect it. He insisted that it was important to learn Julia's work and he pushed me hard to understand how equations behave when you iterate them rather than solve them. At first, I couldn't find anything to say. But later, I decided a computer could take over where Julia had stopped 60 years previously.

Understanding , Learning

“I think it's very important to have both cartoons and more realistic structures. The cartoons have the power of representing the essential very often, but have this intrinsic weakness of being in a certain sense predictable.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Segment 70
Peoples Archive interview
Context: I think it's very important to have both cartoons and more realistic structures. The cartoons have the power of representing the essential very often, but have this intrinsic weakness of being in a certain sense predictable. Once you look at the Sierpinski triangle for a very long time you see more consequences of the construction, but they are rather short consequences, they don't require a very long sequence of thinking. In a certain sense, the most surprising, the richest sciences are those in which we start from simple rules and then go on to very, very long trains of consequences and very long trains of consequences, which you are still predicting correctly.

Thinking , Sense

“The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people. In this spirit, the stock market is one of the most attractive things imaginable. Stock-market data is abundant so I can check everything. Financial markets are very influential and I want to be part of this field now that it is maturing.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)

People , Imagination , Parting

“Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory, and besides were my love when I was a young man. Cauliflowers exemplify a second area of great simplicity, that of shapes which appear more or less the same as you look at them up close or from far away, as you zoom in and zoom out.
Before my work, those shapes had no use, hence no word was needed to denote them. My work created such a need and I coined "fractals."”

Benoît Mandelbrot

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Love , Appearance

“Engineering is too important to wait for science.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

As quoted in "Fractal Finance" by Greg Phelan in Yale Economic Review (Fall 2005) http://www.yaleeconomicreview.com/issues/fall2005/fractalfinance

Science , Waiting

“There is a problem that is specific to financial markets. In most fields of research, when someone makes an important finding, they publish it. In the case of prices, they set up a firm and sell advice about their discovery. If they can make money from it, they will. So the research into market dynamics is a closed field.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)

Money , Problem