List of Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

If One Takes The Kinds Of Risks Which I Took, Which Are Colossal, But Taking Risks, I Was Rewarded By Being Able To Contribute In A Very Substantial Fashion To A Variety Of Fields. I Was Able To Reawaken And Solve Some Very Old Problems.

Pictures Were Completely Eliminated From Mathematics; In Particular When I Was Young This Happened In A Very Strong Fashion.

I Had Very, Very Little Training In Taking An Exam To Determine A Scientist's Life In France.

In Fact, I Barely Missed Being Number One In France In Both Schools. In Particular I Did Very Well In Mathematical Problems.

I Didn't Want To Become A Pure Mathematician, As A Matter Of Fact, My Uncle Was One, So I Knew What The Pure Mathematician Was And I Did Not Want To Be A Pure - I Wanted To Do Something Different.

I Didn't Feel Comfortable At First With Pure Mathematics, Or As A Professor Of Pure Mathematics. I Wanted To Do A Little Bit Of Everything And Explore The World.

I Spent My Time Very Nicely In Many Ways, But Not Fully Satisfactory. Then I Became Professor In France, But Realized That I Was Not - For The Job That I Should Spend My Life In.

Humanity Has Known For A Long Time What Fractals Are. It Is A Very Strange Situation In Which An Idea Which Each Time I Look At All Documents Have Deeper And Deeper Roots, Never (how To Say It), Jelled.

Round About The Accredited And Orderly Facts Of Every Science There Ever Floats A Sort Of Dustcloud Of Exceptional Observations, Of Occurrences Minute And Irregular And Seldom Met With, Which It Always Proves More Easy To Ignore Than To Attend To.

I Don't Seek Power And Do Not Run Around

When People Ask Me What's My Field? I Say, On One Hand, A Fractalist. Perhaps The Only One, The Only Full-time One.

If You Assume Continuity, You Can Open The Well-stocked Mathematical Toolkit Of Continuous Functions And Differential Equations, The Saws And Hammers Of Engineering And Physics For The Past Two Centuries (and The Foreseeable Future).