BS: Obit: Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician

Subject: BS: Obit: Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician
From: Rapparee
Date: 16 Oct 10 - 09:32 PM

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Benoit Mandelbrot, a well-known mathematician who was largely responsible for developing the field of fractal geometry, has died. He was 85.

His wife, Aliette, says he died Thursday of pancreatic cancer. He had lived in Cambridge, Mass.

The Polish-born French mathematician founded the field of fractal geometry, the first broad attempt to quantitatively investigate the notion of roughness. He was interested in both the development and application of fractals, which he also showed could be used elsewhere in nature.

For years, he worked for IBM in New York. Later he became Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University.

Subject: RE: BS: Obit: Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Oct 10 - 02:37 AM

I saw this on Twitter earlier today. One guy said "RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. Thank God he wasn't murdered. It would have taken the cops forever to draw the chalk outline."

If you search on Mandelbrot fractals under images, you'll see how incredible they are.

I think this is also what they were talking about on a snippet of a news story I heard this afternoon when the reporter on NPR or BBC was talking to a mathematician who is a crochet artist about crocheting examples of this theory. She added stitches to show the space and create the roughness. It helps visualize the forms, I guess. I'm pretty sure this interview was a spinoff of a discussion about Mandelbrot.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Obit: Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 17 Oct 10 - 09:21 AM

sometime in the 80s I saw a marvellous b&w image in Scientific American. It was Pietgen's seahorse fractal (scroll down to image 11) & started searching out fractals. I had fractal postcards around my desk & my boss once came back from an interstate trip with a poster of a fractal created on one of the walls in the science museum.

I even bought Pietgen & Richter's Beauty of Fractals for the images. My eyes glaze when I look at the mathematics, but that's not why I bought it! The idea behind these wonderful images fascinated me - that pattern is inside pattern - the curve of the beach is made up of an infinite number of smaller curves, each side of a triangle is made up of smaller trisngles.

my brain glazes over, but I love the images & thank the man who managed to show them to us, with the aid of increasingly complex computers that could calculate what earlier mathematicians assumed existed.

sandra

I found the triangle pic I remembered -
Wikipedia on fractals - see the triangle become a star in History

Subject: RE: BS: Obit: Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician
From: Mrrzy
Date: 17 Oct 10 - 02:22 PM

Awq, man, another one I thought was long dead. Had I known he was alive I would have worried...