Quotes from Benoit Mandelbrot

Both parents worshiped individual achievement, but because of the Depression and the war, they never achieved what they wanted and deserved. So their ambition and high expectations were transferred to me.

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

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

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.

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

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

An exquisitely complex shape now known as the Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex object in mathematics.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

Father was bold, and Mother was cautious. They never shouted at each other but argued constantly about strategy, and they taught me very early that before taking big risks, one must carefully figure the odds.

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