Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

It's like simulating earthquakes: we can over and over study a bubble, crash, bubble, crash. Then we can see mathematically if there's some regular pattern and what's going on in people's brains when prices are going up and before the crash is happening.

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.

Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.

It came as a surprise to find that a professional society and journal (Econometrica) were flourishing, and I entered this area of study with great enthusiasm.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and get it incorporated into prices.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

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.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.

We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

It is well known that the central problem of the whole of modern mathematics is the study of transcendental functions defined by differential equations.

Economics in college was very poor; I was not very impressed with it. I actually wanted to study statistics. I discovered mathematical statistics as an undergraduate and was fascinated with it.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.