A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales... - 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.

Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.

Just the opposite appears to happen in the medium term, three to eight years. A stock that was rising over one multi-year stretch has slightly greater odds of falling in the next. A 1988 study by Fama and another economist, Kenneth R. French, documented this. They looked back over the price records of hundreds of stocks and grouped them into portfolios based on their size. They found that about 10 percent of a stock's performance in one eight-year period-that is, there was a small but measurable tendency for a stock doing well in one decade to do poorly in the next. The effect was weaker, but still statistically significant, at shorter time-scales of three to five years. Others have corroborated such findings.