Chaos Part of 14/31 ound work at the IBM research center in N | Blinkist Summary Book

Chaos
Part of 14/31

ound work at the IBM research center in New York.
In his research too Mandelbrot often chose unfriendly territory. One of his first interests at IBM was studying economic patterns like income distribution and price changes. When he studied fluctuations in cotton prices in the nineteenth century he got a first glimpse of the discovery that would make him famous: the intricately nested nature of our universe.
Here’s the key message: Mandelbrot's fractal geometry revealed the infinitely intricate patterns of complex dynamical systems.
Economists at the time believed that prices tended to fluctuate randomly over the short term but responded to real forces in the economy over the long term – like economic policy and new technology. Even more they thought that most prices should converge around an average. But the cotton prices of the last century clearly hadn’t done that. Using the latest computers that IBM had to offer Mandelbrot investigated. And he found something interesting: the flu