Abstract: "Benoit Mandelbrot's scientific legacy spans an extraordinary range of disciplines, from linguistics and fluid turbulence to cosmology and finance, suggesting the intellectual temperament of a 'fox' in Isaiah Berlin's famous dichotomy of thinkers. This essay argues, however, that Mandelbrot was, at heart, a 'hedgehog': a thinker unified by a single guiding principle. Across his diverse pursuits, the concept of scaling -- manifested in self-similarity, power laws, fractals, and multifractals -- served as the central idea that structured his work. By tracing the continuity of this scaling paradigm through his contributions to mathematics, physics, and economics, the paper reveals a coherent intellectual trajectory masked by apparent eclecticism. Mandelbrot's enduring insight in the modeling of natural and social phenomena can be understood through the lens of the geometry and statistics of scale invariance."
by max_
1 subcomments
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Berlin interprets this aphorism as articulating a profound distinction among thinkers, writers, and, more generally, human beings.
by zkmon
1 subcomments
For thinkers of that time, there was a vast unexplored green field infront of them, to plough and harvest. It's not hard to imagine ploughing skill of one field could help ploughing others too. My friend used to say, if you have quick enough reflexes to play table tennis, you can be good at other sports too.
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