To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characte… - Benoit Mandelbrot

Using his models, his computers look for moments when the short-term traders are moving opposite to the long-term investors-and then he bets that the imbalance will correct itself.

The thought that one unifying idea should continue forever is simply not realistic and therefore not to be hoped for, but I think that for quite a number of years still, perhaps if I am lucky to the end of my life, because I would hate to see that stop in my lifetime, those questions will become very active and still somewhat separate, as different branches of learning become accustomed to them. I cannot imagine that this idea would vanish, not because I am so proud of what I've been doing all my life, but because this is not an artificial thought coming from nowhere in no time and vanishing again rapidly in no time. It has in every one of its manifestations profound roots in the history of the various sciences and the various manners of human enterprise and those roots will not be broken. The continuity of these thoughts will continue, and if any substitute comes, if any other name comes, which is possible, the ideas will remain.

"Society was not a "social pyramid" with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead, it was more of a "social arrow"- very fat at the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thing at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. It is a social law, he wrote: something "in the nature of man.

That something, though expressed in a neat equation, is harsh and Darwinian, in Pareto's view. At the very bottom of the wealth curve, he wrote, men and women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis, or other forms of unfitness. At the very narrow top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time-until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is not progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion's share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, "compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins." Inflammatory stuff-and it burned Pareto's reputation. At his death in 1923, Italian fascists were beatifying him, republicans demonizing him. British philosopher Karl Popper called him the "Theoretician of totalitarianism."