"They found they could have made a tidy paper profit in the following six-month period, on average, 12.01 percent a year above what a simple, market-… - Benoit Mandelbrot

"Still, the idea of chance in markets is difficult to grasp, perhaps because, unlike the anonymous particles in a magnet or molecules in a gas, the millions of people who buy and sell securities are real individuals, complex and familiar. But to say the record of their transactions, the price chart, can be described by random processes is not to say the chart is irrational or haphazard; rather, it is to say it is unpredictable. Again, word derivations are helpful. The English phrase "at random" adapts a medieval French phrase, a randon. It denoted a horse moving headlong, with a wild motion that the rider could neither predict nor control. Another example: In Basque, "chance" is translated as zoria, a derivative of zhar, or bird. The flight of a bird, like the whim of a horse, cannot be predicted or controlled."

This difficulty — am I a mathematician because my degree says so? Am I an engineer because I'm interested in things? Am I a social scientist because I don't think there's a difference between the turbulence in stock markets in terms of unpredictability? At IBM I wouldn't have to worry about that. The names of departments were totally strange and totally meaningless, so it looked like a promising situation for a short time. As it turned out I was going to spend thirty-five years and twelve days at IBM, almost from the beginning to the day when IBM decided that successful research was no longer going to be carried on in that division.

"There is a rich vein of jokes about economists and their assumptions. Take the old one about the engineer, the physicist, and the economist. They find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a sealed can of beans. How to get at them? The engineer proposes breaking the can open with a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun, until it bursts. The economist's approach: "First, assume we have a can opener....