Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life." He referred to himself as a "fractalist". He is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal'", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth20 November 1924
CountryFrance
Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.
One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in 10. But the basic conjecture remains-the Mandelbrot Set.
Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.
If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.
Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.