Top 60 Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

2. “Asking the right questions is as important as answering them.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

3. “A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

4. “Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

5. “Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

6. “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

7. “The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

8. “Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

9. “The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

10. “There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

11. “The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

12. “A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

13. “I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

14. “Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

15. “Order doesn’t come by itself.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

16. “When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

17. “A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

18. “An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

19. “The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

20. “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.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

21. “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.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

22. “In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

23. “Engineering is too important to wait for science.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

24. “Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

25. “There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

26. “In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

27. “My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

28. “Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

29. “I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

30. “Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

31. “I don’t seek power and do not run around.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

32. “The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

33. “If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

34. “I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

35. “The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

36. “I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

37. “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.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

38. “Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

39. “Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

40. “My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

41. “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.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

42. “A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

43. “Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

44. “Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

45. “Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

46. “One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

47. “Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

48. “For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

49. “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.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot

50. “If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.”

— Benoit Mandelbrot