Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a visionary and a scientific maverick. He liked being a maverick and he wanted to make new science. His autobiography, The Fractalist, is a fascinating read surrounding an extraordinary story of a man who through luck and hard work placed himself in a position to think new thoughts.
I have followed his work on fractals in finance for 30 years and have always been surprised by the fact that it still has not been embraced as core view of price behavior. He never felt the need to focus on just one area such as finance. He had some revolutionary views across a number of fields, but was never one to focus on just one revolution. He had greater aims for his work.
Most interesting, he was conscience in his view to bring big thoughts to some fields of science. What ego! What hubris! Yet, he was successful. He had the confidence of a maverick who was willing to take risks. It is a great story to hear in his own words how he got to this vaulted level of a science revolutionary. It was a lonely journey with ups and downs and could only be made by someone with supreme confidence and conviction in his new ideas. That confidence came from a Jewish survivor of WWII Europe who could have easily lost his life. We should strive to be such a maverick.
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