“One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in ten. But the basic conjecture, despite heroic efforts rewarded by two Fields Medals, remains a conjecture, now called MLC: the Mandelbrot Set is locally connected. The notion that these conjectures might have been reached by pure thought — with no picture — is simply inconceivable.”

— Benoît Mandelbrot

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in ten. But the basic conjecture, despi…" by Benoît Mandelbrot?

Benoît Mandelbrot photo

Benoît Mandelbrot56

Polish-born, French and American mathematician 1924–2010

Related quotes

“Langlands' life has been by no means as extravagant as Grothendieck's, but his romanticism is evident to anyone who reads his prose; the audacity of his program, one of the most elaborate syntheses of conjectures and theorems ever undertaken, has few equivalents in any field of scholarship.”

Michael Harris (1954) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 26

“By their very nature the problems imposed on organizational theorists involve so many assumptions and such a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy that virtually all conjectures and all selection criteria remain plausible and nothing gets rejected or highlighted.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 521; as cited in: Richard A. Swanson, ‎Thomas J. Chermack (2013), Theory Building in Applied Disciplines, p. 49

“It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 3-4

“To keep our eyes open longer were but to set our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?”

Thomas Browne book The Garden of Cyrus

Source: The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Ch. 5

“But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“America is no longer an obscure and inaccessible country. Our ships are in every sea, our commerce is in every port, our language is heard all around the globe, steam and lightning have revolutionized the whole domain of human thought, changed all geographical relations, make a day of the present seem equal to a thousand years of the past, and the continent that Columbus only conjectured four centuries ago is now the center of the world.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

“Everybody knows that, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up; spurious, we say; for seldom will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development, a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“A Night of the High Season” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops/night.htm <br class="br">His father, Time

“There were academics and theologians who spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the Earth, on the basis of the Biblical account of it. And as early as 1650, James Ussher had come to the startlingly precise conclusion that the Earth was created in 4004 B. C. on October the 22nd – in the evening, apparently. What God had been doing that morning is still open to conjecture.”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode three: "The Final Hour".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

“The world, and whatever that be which we call the heavens, by the vault of which all things are enclosed, we must conceive to be a deity, to be eternal, without bounds, neither created nor subject at any time to destruction. To inquire what is beyond it is no concern of man; nor can the human mind form any conjecture concerning it.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book II, sec. 1.
Naturalis Historia

“How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can only be conjectured…No one knows, when he places a marijuana cigarette to his lips, whether he will become a joyous reveller in a musical heaven, a mad insensate, a calm philosopher, or a murderer…”

Harry J. Anslinger (1892–1975) 1st Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

"Marijuana — Assassin of Youth" in The American Magazine, Vol. 24 (July 1937), p. 18

Related topics