Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Benoit Mandelbrot's scientific legacy spans an extraordinary range of disciplines, from linguistics and fluid turbulence to cosmology and finance, suggesting the intellectual temperament of a "fox" in Isaiah Berlin's famous dichotomy of thinkers. This essay argues, however, that Mandelbrot was, at heart, a "hedgehog": a thinker unified by a single guiding principle. Across his diverse pursuits, the concept of scaling -- manifested in self-similarity, power laws, fractals, and multifractals -- served as the central idea that structured his work. By tracing the continuity of this scaling paradigm through his contributions to mathematics, physics, and economics, the paper reveals a coherent intellectual trajectory masked by apparent eclecticism. Mandelbrot's enduring insight in the modeling of natural and social phenomena can be understood through the lens of the geometry and statistics of scale invariance.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Mantegna, Rosario N.
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7127301775
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