Quotes About Mandelbrot

Within the most disorderly reams of data lived an unexpected kind of order. Given the arbitrariness of the numbers he was examining, why, Mandelbrot asked himself, should any law hold at all? And why should it apply equally well to personal incomes and cotton prices?

Although Mandelbrot made the most comprehensive geometric use of it, the return of scaling ideas to science in the 1960s and 1970s became an intellectual current that made itself felt simultaneously in many places.

Scaling also became part of a movement in physics that led, more directly than Mandelbrot's own work, to the discipline known as chaos.

SINCE EUCLIDEAN MEASUREMENTS—length, depth, thickness—failed to capture the essence of irregular shapes, Mandelbrot turned to a different idea, the idea of dimension. Dimension is a quality with a much richer life for scientists than for non-scientists.

Mandelbrot moved beyond dimensions 0,1,2,3…to a seeming impossibility: fractional dimensions. The notion is a conceptual high-wire act. For nonmathematicians it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Yet it proves extraordinarily powerful.

Mandelbrot created the word (noun and adjective, English and French) fractal.

It can be argued that the mathematics behind these images [of the orbit diagram for quadratic functions and the Mandelbrot set] is even prettier than the pictures themselves.

Mandelbrot's theoretical results fit very closely the word distribution in many actual languages, indicating that there is a certain natural selection among them, and that the form of a language which survives by the very fact of its use and survival has been driven to take something not too remotely resembling an optimum form of distribution.