Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk. (INSCRIBED BY MANDELBROT TO NOBEL LAUREATE DONALD GLASER, WITH AN ALS.)

MANDELBROT, Benoit B. (1924-2010):

ISBN 10: 0387983635 / ISBN 13: 9780387983639

Published by Berlin, etc.: Springer, 1997., 1997

About this Item

First Edition. Original laminated boards. Near Fine. Inscribed: 'For Don Glaser/With the compliments of/Benoit Mandelbrot/Oct 97'. With: A.L.S. from Mandelbrot to Glaser. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1960 was awarded to Donald A. Glaser 'for the invention of the bubble chamber'. 'The physicist Donald Glaser and I often went to concerts together, and I followed his career closely. As an experimental high-energy physicist, he invented the bubble chamber, which experts in thermodynamics had declared impossible against the laws of physics because it contradicted a statement in a book by established physicist Enrico Fermi. That statement was revealed to be incorrect, the chamber became a basic tool, and Glaser earned a Nobel for it. Only then did he reveal that he had 'converted' from physics to molecular biology. True to form, he attended the meeting on my seventieth birthday celebrating my versatility and regaled participants with tales of his' (Mandelbrot, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, 2014, p. 123).

Seller Inventory # 24232

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Fractals and Scaling in Finance: Discontinuity, Concentration, Risk. (INSCRIBED BY MANDELBROT TO NOBEL LAUREATE DONALD GLASER, WITH AN ALS.)
• Publisher: Berlin, etc.: Springer, 1997.
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0387983635
• ISBN 13: 9780387983639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

IN 1959-61, while the huge Saarinen-designed research laboratory at Yorktown Heights was being built, much of IBM's Research was housed nearby. My group occupied one of the many little houses on the Lamb Estate complex which had been a sanatorium housing wealthy alcoholics. The picture below was taken about 1960. It shows from right to left, T. e. Hu, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am next, staring at a network I have just written on the blackboard. Then comes Paul Gilmore, late of the University of British Columbia, then (seated) Richard Levitan, now retired, and at the left is Benoit Mandelbrot. x FOREWORD EF Even in a Lamb Estate populated exclusively with bright research­ oriented people, Benoit always stood out. His thinking was always fresh, and I enjoyed talking with him about any subject, whether technical, poli­ tical, or historical. He introduced me to the idea that distributions having infinite second moments could be more than a mathematical curiosity and a source of counter-examples. This was a foretaste of the line of thought that eventually led to fractals and to the notion that major pieces of the physical world could be, and in fact could only be, modeled by distrib­ utions and sets that had fractional dimensions. Usually these distributions and sets were known to mathematicians, as they were known to me, as curiosities and counter-intuitive examples used to show graduate students the need for rigor in their proofs.

From the Publisher

Mandelbrot is world famous for his creation of the new mathematics of fractal geometry. Yet few people know that his original field of applied research was in econometrics and financial models, applying ideas of scaling and self-similarity to arrays of data, generated by financial analyses. This book, the first volume in Mandelbrot's collected works, or Selecta, brings together his original papers, as well as many oringinal chapters specifically written for this book.