Interview With Math Legend Benoit Mandelbrot

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.'"

Comments

Quote from TFA

[Meostro]

From TFA, a BRILLIANT! quote from a fella who apparently enjoys being a crotchety old bastard:

All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.

I hope to be like him when I get to be that old. In case any of you haven't heard of Mandelbrot, you should take a look here.

Re:Quote from TFA

[Ned in California]

He probably does enjoy it. I read his book when it first came out in the early 80's. The book was interesting and had beautiful color pictures, but was extremely difficult to read because of the overwhelming arrogance and self aggrandizement. It seemed like every other sentence was something like "We were the first in the world to recognize this" and "All those other smucks never noticed that" and "this would never have been discovered if it weren't for our overarching genius"... I found the mathematics fascinating, but the tone of the book was almost unbearable. For me, the personality and attitude seeping through detracted from what would otherwise tremendously interesting. If I remember correctly, there were accusations that several other researchers were not adequately credited for their part in the development of fractal geometry, but that was over 20 years ago and I could be thinking of something else...

Julia

[Ann Coulter]

Gaston Julia, from circa 1920, investigated fractals before Mandelbrot. His work is the basis of Mandelbrot sets as the points in the Mandelbrot set are exactly those parameters for the corresponding Julia sets that are connected. If anyone should attribute fractals to any one man, Julia is more pronounced than Mandelbrot. Granted, Mandelbrot popularized fractals but the analysis stems from Julia's work.

Re:Is he any relation to

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, don't feed the trolls.

Re:sqrt(-1)

[MustardMan]

You know it really says something about the slashdot moderation system that you had to explain this joke, in fear that mods-on-crack without a clue would mod you down as offtopic or some other such nonsense. I have mod points right now, but decided to comment on the abysmal state of the mod system instead.

BRILLIANT

[scribblej]

Q:Fractals seem to appear all over nature and in economics. Even the internet is fractal. What does that say about the underlying nature of these phenomena?

A:Well, it depends on the field. Circles and straight lines also appear everywhere. Does this mean that all those phenomena have something in common? Of course not. The roughly circular trajectory of a planet around the sun is due to gravitational interactions. Berries are round because a sphere has a smaller skin. The beauty of geometry is that it is a language of extraordinary subtlety that serves many purposes.

Q:So fractals don't point to a single rule underlying reality?

A:There is no single rule that governs the use of geometry. I don't think that one exists.

----

If I believed in a God, I'd say God bless Mr Mandelbrot. As it is, I'll just say, "Damn skippy."

I suppose it's not right that i'm more irritated about the new-age whackos who think fractals really *MEAN* something than the guy who invented the Mandelbrot set is.

(Invented? Discovered? Well, whatever, you know what I mean.)

Now I've got a nice little quote of The Man Himself telling them all they're f-ing idiots.

I LOVE THIS MAN!

Re:BRILLIANT

[scribblej]

Stole?

The Mandelbrot set is *definitely* a direct extension of Gaston Julia's theory and work. The problem is that Julia's work was unfinished.

So I'm not sure how to refer to Mandelbrot's accomplishment -- is it a discovery? A refinement? An invention? I'm not sure what term is correct.

But stolen does not seem correct. And I dont' just mean in the tired "intellectual property is not theft" sense... if he appropriated Julia's intellectual property without permission, I'd go as far as to call that Stealing.

I don't think he did, though -- even in this very article the subject comes up and he gives full credit to Julia for what Julia did.

Everything old is new again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the work the guy has done in the past, but I sometimes I'm dismayed by a little too much self-promotion by academics these days. Recall in his open letter in Wired:

Wired article

Here he mentions the need to conduct fundamental research, which I applaud, but he fails to mention that many, many people are already doing this, and has come across as championing an idea which has already been pursued for decades. If there's one thing I know about life, it's that people with money will almost always do their best to make more of it, and that includes learning how to use the market via financial research. Most mathematically inclined graduate students in Mandelbrot's own university, Yale, go on to financial research.

It reminds me a little of another widely regarded expert, David Gelernter, who has published lots of grandoise nonsense which are devoured readily by people who don't stop to think about what is actually said. For example, in his article about the future ("The Second Coming: A Manifesto"), he says at one point:

"Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us."

Well, that's nice. What's it mean? Perhaps I shouldn't fault the researchers, since getting your name out there seems to be the only way to attract lots of research funds, but every once in a while, it'd be nice to see someone slightly in touch with reality talk about what they want to do and why.

Re:Negative space?

[TCM]

^H^H

Re:Is he any relation to

[Anonymous Coward]

(Another AC)
Christ, why all the down-mods? Am I the only one who found this thread funny?

negative dimensions, not negative space

[phyruxus]

You asked about negative space... in art, that's the area which isn't filled by the subject. Some of Escher's works use interlocking positive and negative space that fills the whole area. In TFA though, Mandelbrot mentioned negative dimensions... and I don't know what those are; but since I'm blabbering away already, I'll take a stab at it from what he said in TFA.

<my guess>
Space has dimensionality; a plane has 2 dimensions, a cube exists in 3, hypercube 4... the numbers here are positive. Mandelbrot said he was using negative dimensions to measure "emptiness". He mentions that only one set is considered "empty" (I presume the null set). My guess (and I only minored in math so don't go betting on this) is that a negative dimension is to a positive dimension what a negative number is to a positive one. I'm thinking that if an object existed in -2 dimensions, it would be capable of having negative area. If you could add that object to an object with positive area, you'd reduce the second object's area.
</my guess>

Here's Mandelbrot's homepage at Yale.

Here's more links.

Most children...

[terrencefw]

(From TFA...) It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.

Well, yes, I suspect most of us could and most likely did on our ZX81's, C64's, BBC B's etc etc.

/puts old man hat on

Could most kids today get their PS2 to draw a mandelbrot set? Does Windows XP provide the tools to acquire and use this knowledge? No.