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Benoit Mandelbrot [1924-2010] French
Rank: 101
Mathematician


Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life." 

Time, Work



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There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time. Time, Work
101
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.
102
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
103
Order doesn't come by itself.
104
The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
105
Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
106
Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
107
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
108
For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
109
Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
110
There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
111
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.
112
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.
113
I don't seek power and do not run around.
114
I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.
115
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.
116
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.
117
Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
118

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