z^2 + c

October 15, 2010 9:51 PM

Nassim Nicholas Taleb states on his website and Facebook account that his occasional collaborator (and fractal pioneer/popularizer) Benoit Mandelbrot has died.
posted by Jpfed (112 comments total)

Mandelbrot's faculty page at Yale.
posted by Jpfed at 9:55 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:01 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:02 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by Ahab at 10:02 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by iamabot at 10:03 PM on October 15, 2010

The Jonathan Coulton song comes to mind. I guess he's not teaching math at Yale anymore...

Thanks for the badass fucking fractals, Benoit.
posted by marble at 10:04 PM on October 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Someone's ready to demonstrate how intricate and predictable heaven really is ...

One hell of a career, one hell of a set of insights.
posted by maudlin at 10:04 PM on October 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Still unconfirmed, according to Laughing Squid, from which I got the maybe-news on Twitter.

If it's true then,

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posted by oneswellfoop at 10:04 PM on October 15, 2010

Thanks for all the groovy trips down the zoom! Such a massive contribution!
posted by Burhanistan at 10:05 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by Lutoslawski at 10:06 PM on October 15, 2010

*

it's more fractal
posted by five fresh fish at 10:06 PM on October 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

There is not much that Mandelbrot has done or seen that can be undone or unseen. For that I thank him immensely

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posted by localhuman at 10:17 PM on October 15, 2010

I had no idea he was still alive.
posted by delmoi at 10:21 PM on October 15, 2010

Me neither. I hate when that happens.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:23 PM on October 15, 2010

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As a freshman math major, I did an independent project on fractals. I wrote to Mandelbrot himself, and he called me on the phone in my college dorm room. And mailed me a package of very interesting preprints on the Mandelbrot set.
posted by Schmucko at 10:23 PM on October 15, 2010 [29 favorites]

...((((((((...)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+c)²+...

We all converge in the end. Rest in peace, and thank you for inspiring so many people to seek beauty in the hidden order within chaos.
posted by wanderingmind at 10:28 PM on October 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

                                              ...o.0o.                          
                                             ....oO....                         
                                            ..ooo  o...                         
                                        ......o      o...                       
                                     .........o      o.......                   
                                   .. oo..o o 00    0oOo0o....o.                
                                 ....o   o               0oo O00.               
                               ......o0                       o..               
                    ..       .....o 00                       o...               
                  .................o                          o...              
                 ...ooo..oo.......O                             0.              
                 ....o  0  OOOOooo                              ..              
                ...oo           o0                              0.              
           .....o..o0                                           .               
      ..........o                                              ..               
o                                                           0o...               
      ..........o                                              ..               
           .....o..o0                                           .               
                ...oo           o0                              0.              
                 ....o  0  OOOOooo                              ..              
                 ...ooo..oo.......O                             0.              
                  .................o                          o...              
                    ..       .....o 00                       o...               
                               ......o0                       o..               
                                 ....o   o               0oo O00.               
                                   .. oo..o o 00    0oOo0o....o.                
                                     .........o      o.......                   
                                        ......o      o...                       
                                            ..ooo  o...                         
                                             ....oO....                         
                                              ...o.0o.       

posted by motty at 10:36 PM on October 15, 2010 [106 favorites]

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posted by wuwei at 10:37 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by sebastienbailard at 10:39 PM on October 15, 2010

Oh, jesus.

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posted by Pope Guilty at 10:40 PM on October 15, 2010

:(
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:53 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by Schlimmbesserung at 11:00 PM on October 15, 2010

His work enriched our appreciation of the beauty of nature and of mathematics. He is already more immortal than most.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:04 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by paladin at 11:05 PM on October 15, 2010

I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with the single dot in this thread.

O
O
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posted by painquale at 11:07 PM on October 15, 2010

- - c@(3:
posted by lapolla at 11:16 PM on October 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

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(I have to admit I liked 'mefi's own' cstross' take on fractals in his Laundry series of novels..)
posted by mrbill at 11:18 PM on October 15, 2010

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posted by everichon at 11:36 PM on October 15, 2010

It must also be noted Mandelbrot's association with and influence on Taleb and his "Black Swan" Economic Pessimism.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:06 AM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

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posted by Your Time Machine Sucks at 12:27 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by jcking77 at 12:31 AM on October 16, 2010

A great loss for humanity.
RIP Professor Mandelbrot
posted by 3mendo at 12:36 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Pseudoephedrine at 12:59 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by DreamerFi at 1:22 AM on October 16, 2010

Oo.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:04 AM on October 16, 2010

He leaves behind an infinite number of smaller copies of himself...
posted by DreamerFi at 2:16 AM on October 16, 2010 [8 favorites]

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posted by gomichild at 2:46 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

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posted by smoke at 3:18 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:38 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Spatch at 3:38 AM on October 16, 2010

His work has been a marvelous influence on my life! Rest in peace, professor.
posted by rmmcclay at 3:49 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by valdesm at 4:10 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 4:12 AM on October 16, 2010

awww. Benoît Mandelbrot is someone I deeply admire.

Interview with Benoit Mandelbrot l TED talk, Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

On a weekend afternoon in the mid-1980's I wandered into one of those IBM exhibits on east 57th Street, on the ground floor of their main building here in NYC. There were a few small videos showing a short biography of Mandelbrot, the surface of a landscape, cauliflower, wind ruffled water, how no geometry before had properly described those rough surfaces, how they are predictably unpredictable. There were several interactive displays, which allowed a person to pick a design and create their own Mandelbrot fractal design.

That there was a geometry for this, the poetry of textures filled my being. He'd articulated complexity. Without really understanding why I felt both relieved and full of joy. Ahh, increments and iteration. In Mandelbrot's own words, "fractals had been pictured forever but their true role had remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered."

"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."

A likable biography l virtual books by and about Mandelbrot l Scientific American article about Who Discovered the Mandelbrot Set ? l the Mandelbrot Set l The Spanky Fractal Database

"The beauty of geometry is that it is a language of extraordinary subtlety that serves many purposes."

My condolences to his wife, Aliette, to his friends and relatives.

∞



posted by nickyskye at 4:27 AM on October 16, 2010 [14 favorites]

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To so many processor cycles wasted in the early 1990s ...
posted by scruss at 4:30 AM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

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posted by condour75 at 4:42 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by sammyo at 4:44 AM on October 16, 2010

Sad on a great many levels.

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posted by WPW at 4:58 AM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

. (zoom in)
posted by Artw at 5:10 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

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posted by Skorgu at 5:14 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by bashos_frog at 5:28 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by bouvin at 5:30 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:52 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Scoo at 5:54 AM on October 16, 2010

Wikipedia has locked his page to prevent people from listing him as deceased. No confirmation yet, apparently.
posted by waitingtoderail at 5:58 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by KaizenSoze at 6:13 AM on October 16, 2010

For what it's worth, Wired is running an obituary.

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posted by ChrisR at 6:59 AM on October 16, 2010

You zoom in on the sadness and there is just more sadness.

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posted by ftrain at 7:13 AM on October 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

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posted by strixus at 7:20 AM on October 16, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html
posted by gen at 7:34 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Tesseractive at 7:40 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by madcaptenor at 8:05 AM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

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posted by fremen at 8:18 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Professor Mandelbrot changed my view of broccoli forever. Romanesco image.

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posted by Quietgal at 8:43 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by pmb at 8:43 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by fourcheesemac at 8:47 AM on October 16, 2010

It's official. The New York Times obit, Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85.
posted by nickyskye at 8:58 AM on October 16, 2010

I'm reading the Madelbrot chapter in Black Swan right now, so this is poignant for me.
posted by chairface at 9:15 AM on October 16, 2010

Wow, I had no idea (as a math major) that Mandelbrot was still alive. I just assumed he was one of those 19th century math giants.

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posted by kmz at 9:15 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Truly a mathematical genius.

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posted by GuyZero at 9:39 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by oonh at 9:58 AM on October 16, 2010

A good occasion to watch some (super high-res here) deep zooms into the Mandelbrot set or download XaoS and take a dive into the Mandelbrot set yourself. (SPOILER: IT'S BIG.)

Also this thread has some mind-blowing videos of the recently (discovered? devloped?) 3-D Mandelbulbs / Mandelboxes predicted by Rudy Rucker.
posted by straight at 10:13 AM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

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posted by Feisty at 10:29 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Bardolph at 10:34 AM on October 16, 2010

Sucks. Well, time to update the song, Joco.

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posted by rokusan at 10:34 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by gcbv at 10:35 AM on October 16, 2010

For a time, I worked down the hall from Dr. Mandelbrot's office.

He would occasionally sit with us for lunch. I both dreaded and eagerly anticipated those days.

I dreaded them because, well, how do you make small talk or discuss your research with someone like him? Someone who was at the IAS during its peak, who collaborated with John von Neumann and walked the halls with Einstein? Whose contributions burst out of the confines of mathematics and found expression in economics, cosmology, and nature?

And indeed, we didn't have much of a conversation. He mostly talked about himself, and the people he's known, and told stories about everything from the war to the first time he used email. Which made sense, since he'd lived an epic life, and was in that period where all men, famous and obscure, are in a reflective mood.

It was fascinating. But it was also kind of annoying. How do you chat with your colleagues about your current research when it seems so trivial compared to, well, running from the Nazis and inventing fractals? His presence immediately overshadowed everyone at the table, and we became polite, respectful, and very silent while he spoke.

And yet, I very much wanted to have a real discussion with him, to talk to him about my work and what I believed the implications could be. Dr. Mandelbrot represented the kind of researcher that I always dreamed of being: a man whose deep passion for his subject was spurred by an appreciation for all the ways in which it could be relevant to the world at large, and whose work reverberated across a dozen fields.

But a vast gulf separated us; our fields were radically different, as were our ages, our fame, our experiences and our accomplishments. Not to mention our egos and our intellects. All we really shared was a hallway.

After a while, he stopped sitting with us for lunch. I wondered if he was disappointed in us. Disappointed with our awe in his presence, our lack of achievement in comparison to his own, and yes, our mild irritation at having to eat lunch with a Famous Person every day.

For my part, I greatly regret never doing more to attempt to bridge that gap. I wish I had been brave enough to ask the stupid questions, to risk his boredom or indifference, to laboriously explain why I thought my area of research (which I had heard him dismiss offhand before) was fascinating and worthy of attention. And to give him the opportunity to tell yet more stories.

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posted by xthlc at 10:46 AM on October 16, 2010 [46 favorites]

Moving and meaningful comment xthlc.
posted by nickyskye at 11:11 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

The true importance of Mandelbrot's work lies outside of science. You will occasionally meet the math or physics wonk who will argue at length that fractals aren't all that useful. To which I always reply, they have been very useful to me as the answer to the still oft-encountered question, "If God isn't the reason the universe looks the way it does, what is?"

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posted by localroger at 11:27 AM on October 16, 2010

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posted by tommasz at 11:43 AM on October 16, 2010

You will occasionally meet the math or physics wonk who will argue at length that fractals aren't all that useful.

They're gonna say that, then any cell phone they have had best have a big whip antenna.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:45 AM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”
posted by warbaby at 11:47 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

On to the big i in the sky.

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posted by maryr at 11:52 AM on October 16, 2010

The true importance of Mandelbrot's work lies outside of science. You will occasionally meet the math or physics wonk who will argue at length that fractals aren't all that useful.

They should remember that in the 19th century, several objects that we'd now recognize as fractals played a pivotal role as counterexamples in math, helping to clarify the nature of the real numbers. For example, Weierstrass's everywhere continuous / nowhere differentiable function, the Cantor set, and the Dirichlet ruler function.

Anyway, maybe Mandelbrot won't be remembered for proving theorems, but he was hugely important to science as a popularizer. How many thousands now in science, math, and engineering were inspired by the beauty of the Mandelbrot set when they were young?

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posted by mubba at 11:59 AM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

A couple of neat points I remember from my freshman project on fractals and the Mandelbrot set:

1) The proof that if Z iterates to a modulus of 2, then its iterates will be unbound was within my freshman ability, though trickier than I expected.

2) The recurring circle spiked with circles shape in the Mandelbrot set has an analytic expression (only approximate I assume other than perhaps for the shape on the real axis). Start with a circle. Add circles on its circumference at angles 2 pi (j/k) radians. Assume j/k is in lowest terms; then make the radius of the added circle (1/k)² of the original circle. (For example, you have a circle at 180 degrees with 1/4 the radius of the starting circle, circles at 120 and 240 degrees have radii of 1/9, etc.) I think the denominator k was related somehow to the associated Julia set within the circle or cycles of iterates of Z.

There was much more to fractals than the Mandelbrot set of course. "Similarity dimension" was simple enough to explain to friends (instead of the more rigorous "Hausdorf dimension").
posted by Schmucko at 12:52 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

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posted by ZeusHumms at 1:29 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by SuzB at 1:32 PM on October 16, 2010

One of the few people, one had the impression, who had looked God in the face without blinking.

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posted by stonepharisee at 1:32 PM on October 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

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posted by Enki at 2:41 PM on October 16, 2010

stonepharisee: One of the few people, one had the impression, who had looked God in the face without blinking.

Or as I think of it:

Einstein: God does not play dice with the Universe.

Mandelbrot: God is the dice in the Universe.
posted by localroger at 2:47 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

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posted by benign at 2:52 PM on October 16, 2010

One of my favourite audio toys - Gingerbread - uses fractals in music generation.

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posted by Artful Codger at 2:53 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

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posted by b1tr0t at 3:10 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by kjh at 3:27 PM on October 16, 2010

A huge loss.

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posted by milestogo at 4:01 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by sinusoidal.tendencies at 6:01 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by Kinbote at 7:06 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by moonbird at 7:33 PM on October 16, 2010

For US mefites, NOVA's episode on Mandelbrot is on Hulu.

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posted by l33tpolicywonk at 7:45 PM on October 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

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posted by Dumsnill at 7:55 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by biddeford at 9:46 PM on October 16, 2010

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posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 12:12 AM on October 17, 2010

Thanks for the badass fucking fractals, Benoit.

Contemplating the ubiquity, etc. of fractals has changed my life.
posted by hapax_legomenon at 12:21 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by MelanieL at 2:52 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by bardophile at 4:07 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 4:09 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by mrgroweler at 7:32 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by jmnugent at 11:32 AM on October 17, 2010

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posted by colin folds five at 4:52 PM on October 17, 2010

B3ta has some recursive tributes

One

Two

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posted by lalochezia at 4:57 PM on October 17, 2010 [3 favorites]

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posted by phrits at 10:52 AM on October 18, 2010

Strange Attractor

I have noticed this coincidence:
My lady wears a string of invisible pearls
It homes toward the center
Of my world
And at the upside down apex of this
Catenary (or wind-blown bubble)
Near to her heart
(Approximately)
Rests a pearl.

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posted by pressF1 at 9:42 AM on October 21, 2010 [1 favorite]