
Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP - bengebre
http://kottke.org/10/10/benoit-mandelbrot-rip
======
jacquesm
Wow, that sucks.

It was fractals that managed to re-ignite my interest in math after having it
de-constructed by highschool teachers.

Amazing images embedded in suspiciously simple formulas. Irresistible.

I owe the man a lot, this is really not a good thing to go to sleep with.

~~~
palish
He died at 85. He had a long full life and accomplished far, far more than you
or I ever will, combined, multiplied by 256. (I'd like to think that's an
exaggeration; alas.)

I don't get why humans mourn the death of people who die at >80, and
especially people who have lead such illustrious, incredible lives. It should
be a time for _celebration_ , of the incredible way in which Mandelbrot has
contributed to the sum of Humanity's Greatness. We should literally throw a
party in His honor.

Humans die around age 80, with a variance of about 55-105. It's just a fact.
For all our claims of progress, we are still hopelessly emotional animals who
are influenced by whatever-happens-to-influence-us rather than solely by logic
and reason.

~~~
whatusername
So I'm not sure if I agree with this argument.. And I'm going to link to the
ultra-layman's version here:
[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)
but why celebrate at someone dying at 85 when we can/should be able to make
them live till 170. Or longer.

On a related note -- for anyone who hasn't read "Harry Potter and the Methods
of Rationality" -- It's brilliant.

~~~
palish
Oh, certainly. And people living until 85/100 has become common only recently
(relatively speaking).

I'm merely mourning the emotional complex of otherwise-logical humans. I
happened to have a frustrating week due to coworkers being unwilling to think
about logical benefits of proposed solutions, letting their emotions overwhelm
their judgement. " _Schedule feature requests_? Schedules cause pain, anguish,
and suffering; also monsters will materialize and devour your soul. _Your
whole soul._ Scheduling is out of the question. P.S. I assigned you a bug to
get done before tomorrow evening (seriously). Drop your multi-week project and
work on that, now. Don't worry, I cleared it with the lead programmer."

So when I read the top comment of the top article on HN, and realized it was
negatively charged with emotion, I suppose I got a little cynical. :)

------
uuilly
"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles,
and bark is not smooth ..."

-Benoit Mandelbrot

~~~
DevX101
...and financial returns are not Gaussian

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jgrahamc
He's not dead, he's just transformed into a similar form at a different level
of zoom.

~~~
palish
Random thought: Every human is a fractal, and our age is our level of zoom.

~~~
mpiccino
That's so interesting. We are definitely self-similar, over and over in the
course of our lives. If you could view a person 4-dimensionally (with time as
the 4th), then the furthest level of zoom would be the person's entire life,
replicating patterns at every instance. Zoom to any shorter time span and you
would likely see something different but still similar. Could the narrowest
level of zoom be a single thought in a single instance? That it itself
probably has fractal-levels of complexity.

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nhebb
The NOVA episode on fractals (and Mandelbrot) was one the of best NOVA's that
I've watched: <http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/>

~~~
mgunes
As recommended viewing I'd add Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon's "Fractals: The Colors of
Infinity", presented by Arthur C. Clarke.

------
HardyLeung
Here's my tribute to Benoit Mandelbrot (text from Wikipedia):

<http://i.imgur.com/RoZ1j.jpg>

Interactive version: <http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/87f79fa9bb6340be>

I was fascinated by fractals when I was very young, and in retrospect, and I
owe a lifetime interest in Mathematics and computer science to him.

~~~
mpiccino
That's awesome. I hope you don't mind that I linked to it.

~~~
HardyLeung
Don't mind at all.

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waterlesscloud
There are some things that literally change how you perceive the world.
Learning about fractal geometry is one of those things.

Farewell, sir!

------
bcl
NYT has confirmed it -
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html>

One of the first programs I wrote on the IBM PC was a Fractal explorer (on a
PS/2 using Turbo Pascal)

------
rcavezza
Can someone explain "A Greek among Romans" from Taleb's homepage?

Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010 A Greek among Romans

~~~
harscoat
It seems that Taleb wants to separate Mandelbrot, a sophisticated, educated,
refined, and übersmart person, from the rest of the crowd.

* "To Benoit Mandelbrot A Greek among Romans" is the Incipit of The "Black Swan" Taleb's book.

* Taleb calls Mandelbrot the "poet of Randomness" in the chap.16 "Aesthetics of Randomness"

* "Intellectually sophisticated characters were exactly what I looked for in life" (and they are seldom). Taleb p.255 The Black Swan, 2007.

* He could also have said an "Athenian among Boeotian" but Romans are powerful (vs. Boeotians) and Benoit Mandelbrot had to fight the establishment with his visual research. "Pariah amongst French Mathematicians". With his Fractal images, his work was "remarkably easy to understand" for the general public.

* Unlike in Rome, the most popular shows in Athenes were not Circus WWE gladiator fights, it was going to Aeschylus or Sophocles tragedies.

Taleb's homepage <http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/>

~~~
albertcardona
A few weeks ago I visited the Acropolis in Athens for the first time. To know
that, about 25 centuries ago, Euripides and Sophocles presented their premiers
in there, at the theater of Dionysos, suddenly gave a pile of rubble an
extraordinary sense of purpose and meaning.

I admire the wit of Taleb to call Mandelbrot a Greek--in this modern world of
very Roman _panem et circenses_.

~~~
jules
The Greeks were truly great. Not only did they know that the earth is a
sphere, they also calculated what size it was, and considered the possibility
that it revolves around its axis and around the sun. They conjectured that
matter is made of indivisible atoms. They calculated the value of pi.
Unfortunately their discoveries based on logic and observation would later be
dictated to be false by the bible (including the value of pi)...

------
whackedspinach
This is so odd. I just gave a quick presentation on him yesterday in theology
class. The prompt was to "Use you creative genius to show God in a visual
manner." I argued that we couldn't describe God in finite terms, so I used
fractals because of their infinite detail. Much better response from the class
than collages of waterfalls and sunsets. And now that I think about it,
fractals came up in my Physics class too. My teacher was describing a talk he
gave at Wolfram Research on the subject.

And then Benoit Mandelbrot died yesterday. Very odd coincidence. Rest in
peace, Mr. Mandelbrot.

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ANH
The first program written in C that I saw that did anything interesting was a
Mandelbrot set generator. It's what hooked me on programming, I think.

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zacharyz
I owe a lot to him. It was a picture of a Mandelbrot on a computer lab wall
that inspired me to pursue programming and computer science in the 90s. It was
the combination of math and art that was so beautiful to me.

I programmed my first mandelbrot in basic, then in pascal and C.

Fractint represent! <http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractint.html>

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darwinGod
Does anyone have pointers/links to application or research of fractals in the
recent past ?

Atleast in network traffic analysis, there seemed to be a lot of buzz about
"self-similar" nature of TCP/IP,Ethernet, till around 2005-2006- you can see
heavily cited papers on Google scholar.

But,of late -atleast in the past three years- you wouldn't find heavily-cited
research/publications on fractals in top conferences. ( I may be wrong, I only
did a quick look up)

Has the interest in application of fractals fizzled out in the past few years?

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systemtrigger
What profound ideas this man brought to the world. Just finished a project for
a guy who mentioned he was deeply inspired by Mandelbrot. With the help of a
few friends, he built the world's largest VW bus. Can you spot the hidden
Mandelbrot set in this header image? <http://www.walterthebus.org/the-
scoop/tribe-walter/>

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aufreak3
Mandelbrot changed much of my world view and how mathematics relates to it.

I see kids in schools being lauded for correctly identifying triangles,
squares and circles and for saying "the moon is a circle". I've wondered
whether teachers ever found it strange that true triangles, squares and cubes
were hard to find in nature. Wondered whether we're teaching kids to look
through the peep hole of classical geometry.

Then I think of Mandelbrot and take comfort in that this man who probably
schooled that way too managed to break free, drop the peep hole, and
mathematically see what we all see day in and day out, but are blind to. That
gives me hope that we as a society are a capable lot.

It also gives me hope that fractals have been around in societies for much
longer than we commonly know of .. presented beautifully by Ron Eglash at TED
- <http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html>

------
iliketosleep
even in his old age his thinking was still fresh. he had an unusual clarity of
thought and was able to convey his theories even to the layman. the man may be
dead but his ideas live on.

------
webspiderus
Learning about the fractional dimension of the coast of Britain was one of the
most interesting discoveries I've had. :(

~~~
hugh3
I never really liked coastlines as an explanation of fractals. Sure, they have
some of the same features as you zoom in from the world map level to the
callipers-along-the-beach level. But it doesn't keep going forever -- you hit
the atomic level where the coastline isn't so much fractal as poorly-defined.

------
tomjen3
I found some screenshot of a program which can render Mandelbrot fractals
extended to the 4th dimension.

If you have Java and a (recent) NVidia or ATI graphic card you can download
the software here <http://jogamp.org/jocl/www/> (it is one of the demos). It
requires OpenCL.

------
mrdoob2
:(

------
gregschlom
I was fascinated by fractals when I was young, I even attended a Mandelbrot
conference when I was 14. I could not understand any of the mathematical
fundamentals, but there was something intuitively beautiful and irresistible
about fractals.

Great man, great contribution to humanity.

------
rbanffy
1+i minutes of silence for him.

------
secret
In his honor, here is Matlab code to generate a Mandlebrot set (from an old
homework assignment):

function inValues= mndl(limits) %no inputs needed, used by the script to zoom
in

%amount of detail to calculate; larger number = better resolution, slower
calculation stepsR=300; stepsI=300;

%maximum iterations used in calculations maxIter=50;

if exist('limits')~=1; %intial range of real and imaginary numbers to compute
lowerR=-2; lowerI=-1.25; higherR=1; higherI=1.25; else numel(limits)==4;
%range to compute after zooming in, determined by axis lowerR=limits(1);
lowerI=limits(3); higherR=limits(2); higherI=limits(4); end

%Constants: slR=(higherR-lowerR)/(stepsR-1); slI=(higherI-lowerI)/(stepsI-1);

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % Create
the Mandelbrot image.

[x,y]=meshgrid([0:stepsR-1] _slR+lowerR,[0:stepsI-1]_ slI+lowerI);
inValues=ones(size(x)); z=zeros(size(x)); c=(x+1i _y);

h_z=1:(stepsR_stepsI); for counter=1:maxIter z(h_z)=z(h_z).^2+c(h_z); h_z=
h_z(abs(z(h_z))<2); inValues(h_z)=inValues(h_z)+1; end
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%format presentation of Mandelbrot image colormap jet;
pcolor(x,y,log(double(inValues))); title('Mandelbrot Image: Zoom In and
Sharpen for Details'); shading interp; axis off;

zoom %turn on zoom feature initially clear inValues

%Buttons:

%recalculate image to enhance after zooming in (just calls the function %again
with new input argument based on current axis) h1=
uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points', ... 'Callback',['mndl(axis);zoom;'],
... 'Position',[105 5 105 20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Sharpen (after
zooming in)');

%turn the zoom button on or off h2= uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points',
... 'Callback',['zoom'], ... 'Position',[215 5 55
20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Zoom On/Off');

%reset the image h3= uicontrol('Parent',gcf,'Units','points', ...
'Callback',['mndl();zoom;'], ... 'Position',[275 5 40
20],'Style','pushbutton','String','Reset');

~~~
secret
Sorry about the weird formatting, it looks fine when I paste in the comment
box. You'll need to add line breaks after the comments to get it working.

~~~
seancron
You might want to put that code in a site such as <http://pastebin.com/> and
link to it instead.

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ANH
His 'Fractals and Scaling In Finance' helped me wrap my brain around power
laws. Perhaps if certain folks had read it when it was first published (1997),
we would have had less financial turmoil these past few years.

------
binarymax
Goodbye professor. You were, and will remain, one of my greatest inspirations.

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GICodeWarrior
RIP <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0>

~~~
seancron
This is the full Mandelbrot Set song by Jonathan Coulton:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPQ1l4sCjY>

And here's Benoit Mandelbrot's giving a talk at TED:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/909>

~~~
jonhendry
I guess Coulton's going to have to change the lyrics a little.

~~~
jrockway
"Right now he's not alive or teaching math at Yale"?

Not quite as funny, though.

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mrdoob2
Source:
[http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=12158836789...](http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=121588367899802&id=13012333374)

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edkennedy
Ahh if only we could discuss things in never ending complexity. Here's to the
father of fractals.

