IMA Public Lecture Series/Special Lectures

Benoit Mandelbrot
Robinson Professor of Mathematical Sciences
Yale University

Friday, October 22, 1999

Free and Open to the Public  

Dreamers used to believe they might predict financial prices exactly, but settled down to believe in predictions that are "mildly" in error yet allow riskless portfolios. The actual variation of prices is "wild" in many ways, but close to the speaker's latest model, which will be sketched.

That model centers on the concept of multifractal time. No longer a recent sensation, fractals/multifractals are, in many fields, not only the best models, but the only sensible
ones. The internet, a recent technology, is also a recent addition to an already long list of cases (of which will be sketched), where fractality holds over a very broad range of scales, as measured by the ratio from the largest to the smallest. These cases range from the works of nature to the works of man.

A public lecture presented by the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications as part  of the IMA workshop "Scalar Phenomena in Communication Networks," October 22 -24, 1999

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