[harscoat]

It seems that Taleb wants to separate Mandelbrot, a sophisticated, educated, refined, and übersmart person, from the rest of the crowd.

* "To Benoit Mandelbrot A Greek among Romans" is the Incipit of The "Black Swan" Taleb's book.

* Taleb calls Mandelbrot the "poet of Randomness" in the chap.16 "Aesthetics of Randomness"

* "Intellectually sophisticated characters were exactly what I looked for in life" (and they are seldom). Taleb p.255 The Black Swan, 2007.

* He could also have said an "Athenian among Boeotian" but Romans are powerful (vs. Boeotians) and Benoit Mandelbrot had to fight the establishment with his visual research. "Pariah amongst French Mathematicians". With his Fractal images, his work was "remarkably easy to understand" for the general public.

* Unlike in Rome, the most popular shows in Athenes were not Circus WWE gladiator fights, it was going to Aeschylus or Sophocles tragedies.

Taleb's homepage http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

[albertcardona]

A few weeks ago I visited the Acropolis in Athens for the first time. To know that, about 25 centuries ago, Euripides and Sophocles presented their premiers in there, at the theater of Dionysos, suddenly gave a pile of rubble an extraordinary sense of purpose and meaning.

I admire the wit of Taleb to call Mandelbrot a Greek--in this modern world of very Roman panem et circenses.

[jules]

The Greeks were truly great. Not only did they know that the earth is a sphere, they also calculated what size it was, and considered the possibility that it revolves around its axis and around the sun. They conjectured that matter is made of indivisible atoms. They calculated the value of pi. Unfortunately their discoveries based on logic and observation would later be dictated to be false by the bible (including the value of pi)...