Slashdot Mirror
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!"
to the Hausdorf Dimension!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I didn't know he was still alive. So much for assumptions.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
You can use your browser to zoom into it infinitely revealing more patterns.
His presentation.
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.
The best I know is GNU XaoS. It can do real-time zooming (it did fine even on my old P133!) and features plenty of settings and fractal equations. I know there are perhaps better programs nowadays that let you easily write custom equations, scripts for 3D fractals and whatnot, but AFAIK none is free and/or supports Linux well.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
I was going to post much the same thing. Some nerd eulogy, 10 words pertaining to the death of a math hero, ~70 devoted to the author. Can we get more HF Asperger/Narcissistic.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
if you look closer, you'll realize that he didn't die, it's just he became too big for us to see.
You can't handle the truth.
In school we had to plot Mandelbrots. Now Mandelbrot has a plot of his own.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/16/1446231/Benoit-Mandelbrot-Dies-At-85?from=rss
rss takes another victim...
I feel a little bad about this but the first thing I thought was, "damn, that one Jonathan Coulton song is going to be really confusing whenever he performs it now."
Can't be worse than immediately thinking "I must post the best yo dawg joke ever." You know, he put the Mandelbrot Set in the Mandelbrot Set, so we can explore it while we explore it.
From this day forward, this recursive meme ought to be associated with Mandelbrot. After all, he put something inside itself infinitely many times long before Xzibit did so once.
I think those pictures he came up with first inspired an entire generation of would-be computer scientists, maths geeks, physicists and Scientific American readers. How such a simple iteration could render those fascinating patterns even on a 2d grid, remains to this day one of the big mysteries. R.I.P. Benoit, I hope you'll finally be able to make sense of the fractal nature of things from up / down there!
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
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!
He gave us order out of chaos; he gave us hope where there was none. And his geometry succeeds where others fail. Mandelbrot's in heaven.
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. :)
Fractals were how this non-artist got his art credit in high school with style. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Too long, lacks pithiness. Vin Diesel's character, Riddick, put it better in Pitch Black: "Got it all wrong, Holy Man. I absolutely believe in God. And I absolutely hate the fucker." Much more concise.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
Yeah, but when you've seen one part of the Mandelbrot set, you've seen it all.
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.