Benoit Mandelbrot

David Pescovitz 5:37 am Fri Nov 12, 2004

New Scientists has an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term fractal and indirectly turned on the public to self-similarity and chaos theory in nature. He turns 80 next week.

What is it like seeing the Mandelbrot set emblazoned on T-shirts and posters?

I'm delighted. I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities – and not for the common mortal – was a very bad idea.

Even though most people view it as a beautiful image and ignore the underlying mathematics?

That's right. Yet there is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.

Link

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