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Interview With Math Legend Benoit Mandelbrot

Posted by timothy on from the strange-bread-loops dept.

Vertigo01 writes "New Scientist is currently featuring an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot the father of the Mandelbrot set, and the man who discovered fractals. 'What motivates me now are ideas I developed 10, 20 or 30 years ago, and the feeling that these ideas may be lost if I don't push them a little bit further.'"

18 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Tried to read it by HarveyBirdman · · Score: 5, Funny
    The interview was very complex, so I broke it down into sentences, but the sentences were as complex as the overall article. How could that be? So I broke it down into words, but still I found more complexity. Analyzing single characters simply brought out more detail. I zoomed into the pixels and whole worlds were unveiled. Where does it end?

    I wrote my first Mandelbrot set explorer on an Atari 800. :-) Yeah... fractal exploration in interpreted BASIC at 1.79 Megahertz. Good times.

    SLOW times, but good times.

    Fuck, I feel old. :-(

    --
    --- Ban humanity.
    1. Re:Tried to read it by coupland · · Score: 3, Funny

      Haha, I love it. When I read the first paragraph of your post I couldn't help but picture Calvin on one of his voyages of discovery while daydreaming in class. Tumbling through space as words zoom in on him and resolve into letters, then pixels, then photons...

  2. sqrt(-1) by phyruxus · · Score: 5, Funny
    ith post!

    note to mods (and people scratching their heads): this is funny (or trying to be) because the mandelbrot set is generated by a function over the complex plane, which has one axis of real numbers, and one axis of the "imaginary" numbers, multiples of i=sqrt(-1).

    --
    "A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
    "d'Oh!" ~Homer
    1. Re:sqrt(-1) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Yeah, a few years ago on slashdot you would post some coordinates and a zoom factor with no other explanation, and people would mod you up because that section of the Mandelbrot set would spell "FP".

    2. Re:sqrt(-1) by phyruxus · · Score: 2, Funny
      >>A basic axiom of a joke is that, if you have to explain it, it's not.

      Why is that funny?

      *ducks*

      --
      "A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
      "d'Oh!" ~Homer
  3. It was an interesting article by TiggertheMad · · Score: 1, Funny

    Did anyone else feel disapointed that every third leter wasn't missing?

    Bwhahahhahahhaha....*sob*...no, it was funny, trust me...

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
  4. micro-mandelbrot by jeffmock · · Score: 3, Funny

    The interview reminds me of an old joke that a "mandelbrot" would become a standard unit for measuring ego. Like Farad, one Mandelbrot would be a very large amount of ego, in common usage you would typically see pico- and micro-mandelbrots.

    jeff

    1. Re:micro-mandelbrot by snarkh · · Score: 2, Funny



      I have to say he has some very stiff competition in scientific circles.

    2. Re:micro-mandelbrot by Pseudonym · · Score: 2, Funny

      So a mandelbrot would be about one deci-edison on the old measure, then?

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  5. Re:Quote from TFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm still waiting for him to show up in my town with the rest of the Legends of Math tour. That show is going to kick so much ass.

  6. Dear Mandelbrot by bludstone · · Score: 3, Funny

    I spent a significant amount of time in highschool playing with a mandelbrot program and color cycling. In this time, I fell into a trance, and lost a good 4 hours of my life.

    When do you plan on giving me these hours of my life back?

    *hypnotised by color cycling mandelbrot sets*

    *drooool*

    --

    no .sig
  7. Re:BRILLIANT by Zeriel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yep, you're still the stupidest motherfucker on Slashdot.

    Honest-to-fucking god, where the fuck do you think new math comes from? If you answered anything but "building atop old math", well...I'd ask you to shoot yourself, but you'd find some way to fuck it up, given your room-temperature IQ.

    --
    "America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
  8. Re:Fractal compression by Ignignot · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm going to hang myself now.

    --
    I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
  9. Re:state of the mod system by Skye16 · · Score: 2, Funny

    God damn, this is turning into an accursed homework assignment entirely too quickly for my liking. What's next, compare and contrast?

  10. Re:Fractal compression by Dr+Caleb · · Score: 2, Funny
    So . . . did you ever find a funny .sig? :-)

    --
    "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
  11. Re:femto-mandelbrots ? by Boronx · · Score: 2, Funny
    A friend and I used the unit of "Bobcat", as in Bobcat Goldwaith, to measure bad acting.

    Costner = Bobcat * $1,000,000 to sign for a movie.

    Which is really not normalized very well since Costner measures several dozen Costners himself.

    --
    Play Command HQ online
  12. Im not going to any .CX domain names by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm still in therapy...

  13. Re:Quote from TFA by Bimikrash · · Score: 3, Funny
    Yeah, my uncle used to work with him. In those pretty IBM ads that featured some of the fractal work they were doing, IBM put Benoit in front of a screen with a bunch of pretty work my uncle was doing at the time. My uncle got no credit, of course.


    Yeah? Well, my aunt used to be his maid! She made his breakfast, combed his hair, and gave him all of his ideas. Not only did she teach him math when he was a kid, she walked 8 miles barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways to do it. And did she get any credit? Nope!