Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 11:30AM
Drew Wolfe

Benoit Mandelbrot

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.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.

Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless."

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

The first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it.

The infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.

 

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