Benoit Mandelbrot: A fitting tribute from “Edge”
Tuesday, 26 October, 2010 Leave a comment
via Edge 330.
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, BENOIT MANDELBROT |
To remember and to honor Benoit Mandelbrot,Edgeis pleased to present several pieces:
BENOIT MANDELBROT, who died on October 14th, was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University and IBM Fellow Emeritus (Physics) at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His books includeThe Fractal Geometry of Nature; Fractals and Scaling in Finance; and (with Richard L. Hudson)The (mis)Behavior of Markets. |
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BENOIT MANDELBROT: A REMEMBRANCE We lost an intellectual giant. Benoit Mandelbrot was one of humankind’s preeminent mathematicians, yet he was much more than that. Mandelbrot bridged art and science with an ease that seemed unreal, and with a depth matched only by few in history, like da Vinci and Helmholtz. What the physicist Helmholtz did 2 centuries ago for the realm of sound, by combining physics, physiology and musical esthetics and “trusting the ear”, Mandelbrot did for the visual realm by “trusting the eye”. Trusting the senses was for both of them the beginning, not the end of the discovery process. Both of them were giants of science and took painstaking care in proving their conjectures, which often took years. In the meantime, they were very open about the source of their intuition, which sometimes brought in skeptics — from science or from art. Ultimately, what they did was a true amalgam of art and science, creative in a deepest sense, and permanently changed the way we all perceive the world around us. At the very start of Benoit Mandelbrot’s path of discovery was a simple question: “How long is the coast of Britain?” — what happens as you keep zooming in? — and he found that a coastline is essentially infinite, always revealing new features. My conversations with Benoit reminded me of a coastline, a beautiful coastline. — Dimitar Sasselov, Astronomer, Harvard University; |