Benoit Mandelbrot Dies At 85 131
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!"
Testimony (Score:5, Interesting)
Another Mandelbrot - Clarke connection (Score:3, Interesting)
I first learned of the Mandelbrot set while watching one of Clarke documentaries, Fractals: the colours of infinity - very nicely done; very inspiring(*), as was the performance (despite its shortness) of Benoit Mandelbrot himself.
Now both gone :/
(*)perhaps too inspiring - I still wait for something like that fractal compression of parrot picture.
Re:From his February 2010 TED visit (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks! More years ago than I care to remember (about the same time I was playing around with Fractint from a covermount floppy of some magazine) the great man came to our university to give a talk. Stupidly I didn't join the queue early enough and got stuck in an overflow room (the maths guys hosting his visit hadn't calculated the demand correctly). Still cool to hear him talk, though. I remember the Genesis Device got a mention:
http://vimeo.com/5810737 [vimeo.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM1r37zIBOQ [youtube.com]
Re:I feel a little bad about this (Score:3, Interesting)
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'll miss the guy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Fractals.. a gateway drug to more complex models (Score:5, Interesting)
Math and youth (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good chance to remind y'all (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Testimony (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember those days - reading his book on the "Fractal complexity of nature" was a real inspiration. It was strange to realize that snowflakes, ice crystallisation, mountain terrain, the outlines of coastlines, branching of trees and lightning, aggregation of soot particles, growth of coral and seashells, periodicity of landslides and earthquakes could all be modelled by fractals.
Some of those simulations could be done within seconds on an Atari(XL) or other home computer. Others took hours like the Mandelbrot set as well as others like John Conway's Game of Life - the 1D version was a bit faster. Spending three Summer evenings running a 6502 implementation of John Conway's "Life" program on a for all 1000+ generations on a 160x80 grid. I always remember the stars in the twilight sky at that time looked just like the cover of the 1978 BYTE magazine.
Re:Dead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Check out 3D fractals (Score:2, Interesting)
My first program... (Score:3, Interesting)
... back in uni - gwbasic I think - was a Mandelbrot set renderer. We were just starting with Mathematical Analysis and the first real struggles with imaginary numbers, sequences, series and limits. I guess messing around with it cost me an exam session, but it was way much more fun than rote theorems (later Profs were good, not that first class though ;( )
RIP
CG procedurals (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago it was popular to make CG images of starships with a procedural/fractal nebula in the background. I used to make comments like: "The Enterprise is investigating the Mandelbrot Nebula", but nobody I know of ever got it.
Re:Math and youth (Score:3, Interesting)
Defying the notion that mathematicians are over the hill at age 30,
Wait 'till you hit 31, that's when mathematicians are in their prime.
A truly great man. The world is a little poorer.. (Score:2, Interesting)
His good counsel... (Score:4, Interesting)