Benoît Mandelbrot: Quotes about people

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

“It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 13, p. 254–255
Context: It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it. So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.

People , Health , Disease

“People want to see patterns in the world. It is how we evolved.”

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.

People , World

“The extraordinary surprise that my first pictures provoked is unlikely to be continued. Many people saw them fifteen years ago, ten years ago. Now children see it on their computers when the computers do nothing else. The surprise is not there.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Segment 144
Peoples Archive interview
Context: The extraordinary surprise that my first pictures provoked is unlikely to be continued. Many people saw them fifteen years ago, ten years ago. Now children see it on their computers when the computers do nothing else. The surprise is not there. The shock of novelty is not there. Therefore the unity that the shock of novelty, surprise, provided to all these activities will not continue. People will know about fractals earlier and earlier, more and more progressively. I think that the best future to expect and perhaps also the best future to hope for, is that fractal ideas will remain either as a peripheral or as a central tool in very many fields.

Children , People

“The word fractal, once introduced, had an extraordinary integrating effect upon myself and upon many people around.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Segment 67
Peoples Archive interview
Context: The word fractal, once introduced, had an extraordinary integrating effect upon myself and upon many people around. Initially again it was simply a word to write a book about, but once a word exists one begins to try to define it, even though initially it was simply something very subjective and indicating my field. Now the main property of all fractals, put in very loose terms, is that each part — they're made of parts — each part is like the whole except it is smaller. After having coined this word I sorted my own research over a very long period of time and I realised that I had been doing almost nothing else in my life.

People

“I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities — and not for the common mortal — was a very bad idea.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)

People , Idea , Universe , Science

“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

“My ambition was not to create a new field, but I would have welcomed a permanent group of people having interests close to mine and therefore breaking the disastrous tendency towards increasingly well-defined fields. Unfortunately, I failed on this essential point, very badly. Order doesn't come by itself.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

People

“Britain for a long time had a reflection of its class structure which meant that people like, well, J. B. S. Haldane who was the nephew of Lord Haldane, or Bertrand Russell who became Lord Russell, could do what they pleased, and it's interesting to think that Bertrand Russell never had a job, he never had to compete for a job. Haldane had four or five different jobs in his life, totally different. He probably could have — if he had been bothered — have just abandoned his job and went on to live otherwise. … But this no longer exists. IBM no longer exists. I don't see a place now where somebody like myself who combined, let's say, unusual gifts and unusual tastes and, who everybody said has promise, was certainly a misfit of the worst kind could find a position at this point and I think that a tragedy.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

Segment 45
Peoples Archive interview

Life , People , Thinking , Time

“In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)

Life , People , Age , Idea

“When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

People , Law , Change , Weather

“My work is more varied than at any other point in my life. I am still carrying out research in pure mathematics. And I am working on an idea that I had several years ago on negative dimensions. … Negative dimensions are a way of measuring how empty something is. In mathematics, only one set is called empty. It contains nothing whatsoever. But I argued that some sets are emptier than others in a certain useful way. It is an idea that almost everyone greets with great suspicion, thinking I've gone soft in the brain in my old age. Then I explain it and people realise it is obvious. Now I'm developing the idea fully with a colleague. I have high hopes that once we write it down properly and give a few lectures about it at suitable places that negative dimensions will become standard in mathematics.”

Benoît Mandelbrot

New Scientist interview (2004)

Life , People , Age , Hope