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
I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.
Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.
The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.
Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.
Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.
The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn't expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.
It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.
The theory of chaos and theory of fractals are separate, but have very strong intersections. That is one part of chaos theory is geometrically expressed by fractal shapes.
In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.
I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.
I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.
I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.
Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.