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!"

Testimony

[kale77in]

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.

Another Mandelbrot - Clarke connection

[sznupi]

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

[RDW]

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

[Burpmaster]

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

[line-bundle]

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

[seandoyle44]

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!

Math and youth

[ortholattice]

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. :)

This is a good chance to remind y'all

[symbolset]

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

[mikael]

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?

[PsychicX]

He was at our graduation ceremony this past May (Hopkins 10) getting an honorary degree, in fact.

Check out 3D fractals

[maktlaust]

Zooming into a Mandelbox, with weird music: http://vimeo.com/13886600 [vimeo.com]

My first program...

[curious.corn]

... 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

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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

[ArundelCastle]

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..

[plasmasurfer]

He was a great man in every sense of the word. Despite his enormous accomplishments and being a historical figure, he still took time to address his emails personally and answered every reasonable request. I was his assistant of sorts during a period in Cambridge, MA, and one time he got this request from a person asking him to write to his HS math teacher because this teacher had inspired him to go into math. Well Prof Mandelbrot wrote him a beautiful letter that still chokes me up when I remember it. After he dictated it to me, I told him that at that moment and from then on, that I would be glad to take a bullet for him. He chuckled, thanked me in a very modest tone and proceeded to the next topic. He was always polite and pleasant and full of energy. May he rest in peace.

His good counsel...

[MikeYoung]

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.