Quotes by Benoit Mandelbrot

• 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.
• Order doesn't come by itself.
• 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.
• Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.
• Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.
• There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.
• There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.
• The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.
• Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.
• An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
• Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.
• 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.
• 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.
• For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
• I don't seek power and do not run around.
• 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.
• 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.