The Misbehavior of Markets
A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
Published on 22. March 2007
368 pages
978-0-465-00468-3 (ISBN)
Description
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, one of the century's most influential mathematicians, is world-famous for making mathematical sense of a fact everybody knows but that geometers from Euclid on down had never assimilated: Clouds are not round, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not smooth. To these classic lines we can now add another example: Markets are not the safe bet your broker may claim. In his first book for a general audience, Mandelbrot, with co-author Richard L. Hudson, shows how the dominant way of thinking about the behavior of markets-a set of mathematical assumptions a century old and still learned by every MBA and financier in the world-simply does not work. As he did for the physical world in his classic The Fractal Geometry of Nature , Mandelbrot here uses fractal geometry to propose a new, more accurate way of describing market behavior. The complex gyrations of IBM's stock price and the dollar-euro exchange rate can now be reduced to straightforward formulae that yield a far better model of how risky they are. With his fractal tools, Mandelbrot has gotten to the bottom of how financial markets really work, and in doing so, he describes the volatile, dangerous (and strangely beautiful) properties that financial experts have never before accounted for. The result is no less than the foundation for a new science of finance.
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Additional editions
Richard L. Hudson | Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The (Mis)behavior of Markets
A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward
Book
08/2004
Basic Books
€42.27
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Persons
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was the inventor of fractal geometry, whose most famous example, the Mandlebrot Set, is one of the most iconic images in mathematics. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University and a Fellow Emeritus at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Laboratory and the recipient of the Wolf Prize in Physics and the Japan Prize in science and technology, as well as awards from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the IEEE, and numerous universities in the U.S. and abroad.
His books include Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, which was later expanded into the classic The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and a memoir, The Fractalist, which was published posthumously.
Richard L. Hudson was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal's European edition for six years, and a Journal reporter and editor for twenty-five years. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard University and a 1991 Knight Fellow of MIT. Now the CEO and editor of Science Publishing Ltd., he lives in Brussels, Belgium.
His books include Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, which was later expanded into the classic The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and a memoir, The Fractalist, which was published posthumously.
Richard L. Hudson was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal's European edition for six years, and a Journal reporter and editor for twenty-five years. He is a 1978 graduate of Harvard University and a 1991 Knight Fellow of MIT. Now the CEO and editor of Science Publishing Ltd., he lives in Brussels, Belgium.
