Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
" "Weierstrass, Cantor, or Peano! In physics, an analogous development threatened since about 1800, since Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics avoided all illustration. And it is exemplified by the statement by P. A. M. Dirac (in the preface of his 1930 Quantum Mechanics) that nature’s “fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.” The wide and uncritical acceptance of this view has become destructive. In particular, in the theory of fractals “to see is to believe.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Poland-born French-American mathematician known as the "father of fractal geometry".
Biography information from Wikiquote
Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
I always saw a close kinship between the needs of "pure" mathematics and a certain hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. The son of Earth, he had to touch the ground every so often in order to reestablish contact with his Mother; otherwise his strength waned. To strangle him, Hercules simply held him off the ground. Back to mathematics. Separation from any down-to-earth input could safely be complete for long periods — but not forever. In particular, the mathematical study of Brownian motion deserved a fresh contact with reality.
"In an ever-more complex world, Mandelbrot argues, scientists need both tools: image as well as number, the geometric view as well as the analytic. The two should work together. Visual geometry is like an experienced doctor's savvy in reading a patient's complexion, charts, and X-rays. Precise analysis is like the medical test results-the raw numbers of blood pressure and chemistry. "A good doctor looks at both, the pictures and the numbers. Science needs to work that way too," he says."