When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

Where did Mandelbrot’s geometric “inner voice” come from? He suggests it may have something to do with his childhood fascination with chess and maps. He also credits the “outdated” math books he happened to get his hands on as a teenage émigré, which had more pictures than those used in school then (and today).

What struck me most, though, was the singularity of Mandelbrot’s intuition. Time and again, he found simplicity and even beauty where others saw irredeemable messiness.

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick,

The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

“This helps answer the question I am often asked by U.S. parents or teachers: ‘How come twenty-year-old students in France are so much better in math?’ Part of the answer: ‘Because they are, in effect, bribed.’”

The Bourbakistes seemed to cut off mathematics from natural science, to make it into a sort of logical theology. They regarded geometry, so integral to Mandelbrot’s Keplerian dream, as a dead branch of mathematics, fit for children at best. So, on his second day at the École Normale, Mandelbrot resigned

The name Bourbaki was jocularly taken from a hapless nineteenth-century French general who once tried to shoot himself in the head but missed

Mandelbrot conceived what he calls his “Keplerian quest.” Three centuries earlier, Johannes Kepler had made sense of the seemingly irregular motions of the planets by a single geometric insight: he posited that their orbits, instead of being circular as had been supposed since ancient times, took the form of an ellipse. As a teenager, Mandelbrot “came to worship” Kepler’s achievement and aspired to do something similar—to impose order on an inchoate area of science through a bold geometric stroke.

Where did Mandelbrot’s geometric “inner voice” come from? He suggests it may have something to do with his childhood fascination with chess and maps.

What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable.