
The Mandelbrot Monk (1999) - pulisse
http://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/MandelSet/MandelMonk/MandelMonk.html
======
DougHaber
According to Wikipedia:

    
    
      Udo of Aachen (c.1200–1270) is a fictional monk, a 
      creation of British technical writer
      Ray Girvan, who introduced him in an April Fool's hoax
      article in 1999. According to the article, Udo was an
      illustrator and theologian who discovered the Mandelbrot
      set some 700 years before Benoît Mandelbrot.
    
      Additional details of the hoax include the rediscovery of
      Udo's works by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a Harvard
      mathematician, who supposedly saw a picture of the
      Mandelbrot set in an illumination for a 13th-century carol.
      Girvan also attributed Udo as a mystic and poet whose
      poetry was set to music by Carl Orff with the haunting O
      Fortuna in Carmina Burana.
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen)

~~~
krylon
I have to admit I am a little sad this was an April fools joke. It would have
been so cool if some obscure medieval monk had discovered the Mandelbrot set
centuries ago.

Then again, IIRC, complex numbers were not invented (discovered?) until the
1500s, so good old Udo would have had a hard time figuring out the math.

~~~
donquichotte
He "did" invent complex numbers! From TFA:

"Initially, Udo's aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach
heaven. He assumed each person's soul was composed of independent parts he
called "profanus" (profane) and "animi" (spiritual), and represented these
parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating
these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic,
the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary
numbers of modern mathematics."

~~~
krylon
Serves me right for not reading the "article" thoroughly. ;-)

------
andy_wrote
Fun story! But look at the date at the bottom...

~~~
ben_w
I was chatting about this with a friend recently. I spent most the last 15
years thinking it was real.

~~~
pvg
Had you written your own Mandelbrot set renderer or not when you first came
across the story?

~~~
ben_w
I can't remember. It was within a few years of me writing such a renderer on
my graphics calculator, but I'm not sure which came first.

------
benjohnson
While this is a fun hoax, there is an 13th century illuminated manuscript that
does get the imagination going:

[https://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/articles/frontispiece-
of-a...](https://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/articles/frontispiece-of-a-bible-
moralisee-ca-1250/)

------
lukas
This is clearly not a true story. I think someone should flag it or put a
warning in the title.

~~~
gabcoh
I think this comments section is enough. It's more fun to go into the story
without knowing that it's fake.

~~~
imr_
NO it's not fun. I just sent it to all my colleagues...

~~~
qubex
You are not alone: so did I.

------
still_grokking
Reading the headline I first thought it is about "Buddhabrot".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot)

------
masswerk
Notably, 1999 is also the year which saw the beginning of intensified studies
on the Archimedes Palimpsest[1]. Some inspiration may have been drawn from
this.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest)

------
hprotagonist
got me.

those plurality-of-worlds Lorites sure do get around.

