If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.
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As quoted in "Fractal Finance" by Greg Phelan in Yale Economic Review (Fall 2005)Benoit Mandelbrot
» Benoit Mandelbrot - all quotes »
Do I claim that everything that is not smooth is fractal? That fractals suffice to solve every problem of science? Not in the least. What I'm asserting very strongly is that, when some real thing is found to be un-smooth, the next mathematical model to try is fractal or multi-fractal. A complicated phenomenon need not be fractal, but finding that a phenomenon is "not even fractal" is bad news, because so far nobody has invested anywhere near my effort in identifying and creating new techniques valid beyond fractals. Since roughness is everywhere, fractals — although they do not apply to everything — are present everywhere. And very often the same techniques apply in areas that, by every other account except geometric structure, are separate.
Benoit Mandelbrot
A branch of physics that I was working in for many years has lately become much less active. Many problems have been solved and others are so difficult that nobody knows what to do about them. This means that I do much less physics today than 15 years ago. By contrast, fractal tools have plenty to do. There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable. The hammer I crafted is the first effective tool for all kinds of roughness and nobody will deny that there is at last some roughness everywhere.
Benoit Mandelbrot
I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.
Benoit Mandelbrot
If I had a hammer,
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening,
All over this land.
I'd hammer out danger,
I'd hammer out a warning,
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land...
Well I got a hammer,
And I got a bell,
And I got a song to sing, all over this land.
It's the hammer of Justice,
It's the bell of Freedom,
It's the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.Pete Seeger
"Do you know what I need? A hammer built out of a starship. It just seems practical. Something like that would have dozens of uses around the home. All of them needlessly apocolyptic, probably, but when you've got a doom hammer, every problem is meaningless once the interstellar dust settles."
Brian Clevinger
Mandelbrot, Benoit
Mandelson, Peter
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