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Benoit Mandelbrot is universally familiar as the father of fractal geometry and the discoverer of the eponymous Mandelbrot set - "named after me by my colleagues," as he bashfully admits - and in a long and maverick career has turned his attention to just about every subject from turbulent systems to CGI. Now in this, his latest work, he condenses his economics writings into a highly readable form for the layman. Markets, says Mandelbrot, do not obey the simple Gaussian curve (think of a man tossing a coin over and over, each flip independent of the last) which has provided the basis for the most academically respectable models of the last century. Price changes are not continuous. There is no such thing as objective value. Disastrous, impossible, Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern type runs can, and do, occur. Charts of price changes over the course of a hundred years look very similar to changes over a day, if you remove the indices; the man who tells you to invest your money long-term with a view to reducing risk is doing you no favours. What's more, fund-managers already tacitly acknowledge some of the truth of this, and although they may learn the theory at business school, nobody rigorously applies it for long in practice.
Where Mandelbrot shines is in making a potentially forbidding subject highly accessible; in his discursive, entertaining style, in his constant use of visuals to elucidate price movements and models and the satisfyingly chewy mathematics of fractal dimension.
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