But the financial industry is supremely pragmatic. While it may genuflect to the old icons, it invests its research dollars in the search for newer, … - Benoit Mandelbrot

"In the 1960's, some old-timers on Wall Street-the men who remembered the trauma of the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression-gave me a warning: "When we fade from this business, something will be lost. That is the memory of 1929." Because of that personal recollection, they said, they acted with more caution, than they otherwise might. Collectively, their generation provided an in-built brake on the wildest form of speculation, an insurance policy against financial excess and consequent catastrophe. Their memories provided a practical form of long-term dependence in the financial markets. Is it any wonder that in 1987 when most of those men were gone and their wisdom forgotten, the market encountered its first crash in nearly sixty years? Or that, two decades later, we would see the biggest bull market, and the worst bear market, in generations? Yet standard financial theory holds that, in modeling markets, all that matters is today's news and the expectations of tomorrow's news."

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

"A key point in my work: Randomness has more than one "state," or form, and each, if allowed to play out on a financial market, would have a radically different effect on the way prices behave. One is the most familiar and manageable form of chance, which I call "mild." It is the randomness of a coin toss, the static of a badly tuned radio. Its classic mathematical expression is the bell curve, or "normal" probability distribution-so-called because it was long viewed as the norm in nature. Temperature, pressure, or other features of nature under study are assumed to vary only so much, and not an iota more, from the average value. At the opposite extreme is what I call "wild" randomness. This is far more irregular, more unpredictable. It is the variation of the Cornish coastline-savage promontories, craggy rocks, and unexpectedly calm bays. The fluctuation from one value to the next is limitless and frightening. In between the two extremes is a third state, which I call "slow" randomness."