Customer Reviews

Multifractals and 1/f Noise: Wild Self-Affinity in Physics (1963-1976)

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I went and asked K. G. Monks for help. Even with his direction I only got a bad approximation.
The rest of the book is less readable than that. It is a collection of Dr. Mandelbrot's
old articles. I interviewed Dr. Mandelbrot several years ago before a lecture of his
at U. C. Riverside. He is not a very friendly or communicative man. His
articles in general are very hard to read and without adequate history and definitions.
It is , thus, incredible that his original book was such a success. Looking at
his work, I would call him a "noise" specialist and not a fractalist at all.
This book is really a book about very hard parts of noise theory.
In my mind Dr. Mandelbrot is very wrong in many of his conclusions ,
but he has some very nice results here. Don't
waste your money if you don't have a graduate degree in mathematics
with a specialization in noise, chaos and dynamics. Most of his recent
articles have been on multifractals applied to stock market theory.
He is one of the great men of our age
and these articles are his feet of clay.

M. is a great man in (large) part because of what he has written, including these papers. And yes they are challenging. I find them nearly self-contained though.