Sculpture and Benoit Mandelbrot

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."  Benoit Mandlebrot. (1924-2010)

Funny, that sounds so obvious, but it took a mathematical genius like Mandelbrot to show us another way of seeing AND thinking about physical forms and patterns of all sorts, including the stock market.

Mandlebrot - photo from Paul Barsch's site
who writes of Ten Lessons from Mandelbrot applied to Marketing.

Mandelbrot saw the world differently. Like an artist, he actually took the time to look at the world and see what was really there.... hence the quote. His search for understanding the complexities of nature gave us the field called Fractal Geometry.

The 12 /26/ 2010 NY Times Magazine issue, The Lives They Lived, included an obituary on Mandelbrot, the man who gave structure to chaos. Read it.

Click here to see more fractals.