Benoit Mandelbrot

By at 5:37 am Friday, Nov 12

New Scientists has an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term fractal and indirectly turned on the public to self-similarity and chaos theory in nature. He turns 80 next week.
mandelbrotWhat is it like seeing the Mandelbrot set emblazoned on T-shirts and posters?
I'm delighted. I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities - and not for the common mortal - was a very bad idea.

Even though most people view it as a beautiful image and ignore the underlying mathematics?
That's right. Yet there is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.
Link

David Pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

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