"The test of a good theory is that the consequences are numerous and accurate, " Mandelbrot says.
Before all this Dr Mandelbrot worked in the obscurity that modern mathematicians have resigned themselves to.
Mandelbrot moved on to greener pastures, applying his new mathematical tools to a wide variety of fields.
The view Mandelbrot is arguing against goes like this: Price is determined by binary decisions, like coin tossing.
The lesson, to Mandelbrot, is obvious: Go with the math that matches the problem, even if it seems strange.
However, Benoit Mandelbrot asserted that investment returns did NOT follow a normal distribution but instead followed the Pareto-Levy distribution mentioned above.
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Mandelbrot was writing about the presence of fat tails in the 1960s.
One team, for instance, inserted the virus into a program running a Mandelbrot set, a complex, mathematics-based structure named after the father of fractal geometry.
Around ten years ago, Mandelbrot says, he began thinking very seriously about how to fix the thorny problems of economics he had attacked so many years before.
Trees, clouds, numerous patterns that we see in daily life--all turned out to be fractal in nature, described by a branch of mathematics that Mandelbrot had started.
Mandelbrot's first foray into fractal economics, when he was discovering ways to use computers to predict fractal systems at IBM in the '60s, had major impact on the field.
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