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Benoit Mandelbrot Dies At 85
Beetle B. writes "Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at the age of 85. I first learned of the Mandelbrot set while reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From The Grand Banks. Soon after, I got hold of the best fractal generation software of the day — Fractint — and ran it for long periods of time on my XT, exploring the beautiful world that Mandelbrot, among others, had opened up for me. That it was only on a 4-color CGA did not deter me!"
I was in year nine (mid-high-school) in country Australia, when my grandmother gave me a subscription to Scientific American; on the front of one of the first issues was a Mandelbrot set. I put the pseudocode into Atari Basic on my trusty 800XL (1.86kHz), and it produced a 40x40 graph of the set in just on 6 hours. It's been one of my standard learn-a-new-language exercises ever since, and the single thing I love the most about mathematics.
I met the guy personally at least 4 times in the last 5 years. He was great to get along with and not aloof at all for all his successes.
I'm currently following up on is work in finance (stable distributions).
May he RIP, and may his family consider him resting.
I remember the Scientific American with the Mandelbrot set on the cover - it was a huge influence on my life. I was working as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board in DC and was losing interest in mathematical modeling as a way to understand anything in the real world. Most of the models I was dealing with were linear or mostly linear. When I read the article at first I thought it was some cheap trick or approximation... but gradually I realized it was different than anything I had seen before. So - being a rational, optimizing actor I then left the field of economics .. the most utility-maximizing decision I ever made :-)
Since then I've always viewed fractals as a gateway drug to more complex models of the universe. So many processes unfold over time; fractals are just one of the ways to get a glimpse of what might be going on.
Thanks Dr. Mandelbrot!
Defying the notion that mathematicians are over the hill at age 30, Mandelbrot made his fractal breakthroughs when he was in his 50s. It gives the rest of us some hope. :)
Many of the people who have discovered things great and small that astonish and delight are still living. It's not too late to look them up on the internet and personally thank them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A sad day for me and for others who admired his inveterate quirkiness and his uncanny ability to "think outside the box." I never met Dr. Mandelbrot, but we had about a dozen phone conversations over the past 15 years. He liked my research and appreciated that his work on cotton prices inspired me to challenge conventional wisdom in my field of real estate. In our last conversation, after mentioning that I was updating some old work, I asked him whether to employ newer technology or simply to extend the earlier work with the same technology used back in 1995. As was often the case, he related a story. This time it concerned a mentor whom he described as a genius and aviation pioneer who received little recognition for his work. Why? Well, it seemed that this man never was satisfied with his aircraft designs, always knowing that he could do something better. As a consequence of his endless quest for perfection, the man never saw his airplane fly. Dr. Mandelbrot's advice to me was "Just get the plane to fly. Then, others will know what can be refined." I will miss his sage counsel.