Benoit Mandelbrot
Born: 1924 in Warsaw, Poland
Died:
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Benoit Mandelbrot was largely responsible for the present interest in Fractal Geometry. He showed how Fractals can occur in many different places in both Mathematics and elsewhere in Nature.
Benoit Mandelbrot was born in Poland in 1924. His family emigrated to France in 1936 and his uncle Szolem Mandelbrojt, who was Professor of Mathematics at the Collège de France and the succesor of Hadamard in this post, took responsibility for his education.
Benoit attended the Lycˇe Rolin in Paris, then studied at Lyon, then at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. He worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific from 1949 until 1957. After that he worked in the USA.
In 1945 his uncle introduced him to Julia's important 1918 paper as a masterpiece and a potential source of interesting problems, but Mandelbrot did not like it. Instead he chose his own very different course which, however, brought him back to Julia's paper in 1977 after a path through many different sciences which some characterise as highly individualistic or nomadic.
With the aid of computer graphics, Mandelbrot who now works at IBM's Watson Research Center, was able to show how Julia's work is a source of some of the most beautiful fractals known today.
The Mandelbrot set is a connected set of points in the complex plane. Pick a point Z
in the complex plane.
Calculate: Z
= Z
+ Z
Z
= Z + Z
Z
= Z + Z
.............
If the sequence Z, Z, Z, Z, ... remains within a distance of 2 of the origin forever, then the point Z is said to be in the Mandelbrot set. If the sequence diverges from the origin, then the point is not in the set.
His work was first put forward in his book Les objets fractals, forn, hasard et dimension (1975) and more fully in The fractal geometry of nature in 1982.
As well as IBM Fellow at the Watson Research Center he is Professor of the Practice of Mathematics at Harvard University. <
In 1985 Mandelbrot was awarded the 'Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science'. The following year he received the Franklin Medal. In 1987 he was honoured with the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, receiving the Steinmetz Medal in 1988 and many more awards including the Nevada Medal in 1991.
References elsewhere in this archive:
Show me the Mandelbrot set
References:
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