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.
