Quotes By Benoit Mandelbrot

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

Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

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

Order doesn't come by itself.

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

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.

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

I don't seek power and do not run around.

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.