Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (November 20, 1924 - October 14, 2010) was a Polish-French-American mathematician best known for developing the concept of fractals and founding fractal geometry. His work revolutionized the understanding of irregular and complex shapes found in nature, from coastlines and clouds to blood vessels. The Mandelbrot set, a mathematically generated structure of infinite complexity through iteration, became an iconic symbol of non-Euclidean geometry. His ideas have found applications in a wide range of fields including physics, economics, computer science, and biology.
Quotes
- How Long Is the Coast of Britain?
- Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.
- A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...
- The Mandelbrot set covers a small space yet carries a large number of different implications. Is it a fitting epitaph? Absolutely.
- There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time. For much of my life, however, there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.
- Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.
- Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.
- I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.
- Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines.