“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.

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Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Benoît Mandelbrot56
Polish-born, French and American mathematician 1924–2010

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