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Benoît Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, dies

mandelbrot.jpgThe mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, widely known as the father of fractal geometry, died on October 14, aged 85.

Mandelbrot found mathematical formulae to describe fractal shapes – in which each part mimics the pattern of the whole. As with the coastline of a country; the head of a piece of broccoli or variations in stock market prices, magnifying one portion of the pattern doesn’t reveal underlying simpler lines; rather, one sees a never-ending and similar complexity. (Mandelbrot also coined the word ‘fractal’, from the Latin fractus, or ‘broken’, in 1975).

Fractal geometry is not just beautiful, but useful – for modelling turbulence, financial systems, the distribution of galaxies. It underpins the physics of disorder and chaos theory. “My whole career became one long, ardent pursuit of the concept of roughness,” Mandelbrot wrote in an essay on receiving the 1993 Wolf prize for physics.

Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw in 1924, but emigrated to France with his family in 1936, and gained his doctorate there. The work that would make him a household name was done at IBM’s laboratories at Yorktown Heights in New York, where he was appointed as a visiting fellow in 1958. He later taught at Yale, becoming a professor there in 1999.

He was proud of what he termed his ‘maverick’s apprenticeship’:

“History proves that it is a misconception that theoretical scientists do their best work when very young; that a person who hasn’t already earned admiration by the age of 25 or 30 will never catch up. Were it valid, this rule would have annihilated all the mavericks. But I view it as being in good part a self-fulfilling prophecy that pleases the scientific “guilds” but is harmful. To the contrary, mavericks’ kind of research requires slow and gradual buildup and maturation – and seems to extend longer than the norm.”

Mandelbrot’s 1967 essay (Science, 156, 636-638; 1967): ‘How long is the coast of Britain?’; his Yale website; and his 1982 book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Some Mandelbrot obituaries and appreciations have been published in The Telegraph (UK), The New York Times and The Atlantic.

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    Mikael Backlund said:

    Benoit Mandelbrot’s most famous fractal the Mandelbrot set can be zoomed and played with online:

    fractal generator

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