Quotes from Benoit Mandelbrot

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.

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.

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

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.

Where do I really belong? I avoid saying everywhere - which switches all too easily to nowhere. Instead, when pressed, I call myself a fractalist.

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

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

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

Most economists, when modeling market behavior, tend to sweep major fluctuations under the rug and assume they are anomalies. What I have found is that major rises and falls in prices are actually inevitable.

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

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.

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

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

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

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.

There's nothing really connecting the behavior of the Nile, metallurgy, and the behavior of prices except that I had the mathematical tools to explain them.

When I first began studying prices, it wasn't a topic that mathematicians were working on. Purely by accident, I saw a set of data on price changes presented in a lecture and realized they behaved similarly to the geometric models I was already studying.

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

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.

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.

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

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.

Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.