Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP

http://kottke.org/10/10/benoit-mandelbrot-rip

by bengebre • 16 years ago

338 83 16 years ago

kottke.org

edkennedy• 16 years ago

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

GICodeWarrior• 16 years ago

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

seancron2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

colonelxc• 16 years ago

The song is free on Coulton's website:

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set

mrdoob22• 16 years ago

Source: http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=12158836789...

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

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

Farewell, sir!

nhebb• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

stevenrace• 16 years ago

Benoit speaking on 'Roughness' at MIT (140min): http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/52

ciupicri• 16 years ago

We're sorry, but this video is not available in your region due to rights restriction

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

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.

palish3• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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_... 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.

Tichy3• 16 years ago

I don't get why people think it is "OK" if somebody dies at age 80 or older. Yes, it is the course of life. But nobody likes to die - no matter how old (except maybe when suffering from terrible painful illnesses).

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

I don't think this thread is the right spot to give you a suitable reply, but let's just leave it at that I disagree strongly with you.

shrikant• 16 years ago

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;

-- John Donne

wynand• 16 years ago

"accomplished far, far more than you or I ever will"

This is a common snowclone (X is <far superior in some dimension - often intelligence> than you or I) that really bothers me. It's a kind of hero worship that attributes too much to the hero in question and makes unfounded assertions about "you or I".

I can understand that people become enthuisiastic about their heroes and that exaggeration is even a form of showing respect. But too much is no good for anyone.

losvedir• 16 years ago

> It should be a time for celebration, of the incredible way in which Mandelbrot has contributed to the sum of Humanity's Greatness.

What's the point of celebrating now that he's dead?

My great grandmother used to tell all of us -- if you're planning to come to my funeral: don't. Use the money and time you'd spend then and come visit me now.

I think now is a reasonable time to mourn. A great mathematician is no longer around to give talks (I went to one a few years ago and thought it was very neat), and if you know him personally then you won't get to see him and converse with him anymore. That's very sad. Sure, he may have done abstractly great things, but there's no denying there are sad aspects to it.

But as for celebrations and parties, those should be done while the guy is still around to enjoy, I think.

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

> I don't get why humans mourn the death of people who die at >80

Because we wanted a little more time with him? Because we don't have enough geniuses?

qq66• 16 years ago

It's not sad that he died, he was 85 years old. He gave a lot to the world and had a long (and judging by the last talk of his I attended, happy) life. Pretty good deal if you ask me.

revorad• 16 years ago

At whatever age someone dies, it is sad. It's always sad. Let's not deny that.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

People morn the death of babies, who have accomplished nothing. Ought we not then morn to an even greater extend those who have accomplished something?

webspiderus• 16 years ago

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

hugh34• 16 years ago

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.

uuilly• 16 years ago

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

-Benoit Mandelbrot

DevX101• 16 years ago

...and financial returns are not Gaussian

rcavezza• 16 years ago

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

Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010 A Greek among Romans

DTrejo• 16 years ago

It has to do with platonicity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy#Relation_to_Plato...

harscoat3• 16 years ago

Sorry nothing to do with "Platonicity" which Taleb strongly criticized. A "greek among Romans", is imo to describe somebody educated, vs a farmer like Cato the old, well versed in refined art vs. propaganda "pompier" political art (to show Power more than beauty or harmony; Romans could only copy Praxiteles), interested in Philosophy more than law. The Circus for the People of Athenes was tragedy by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

adulau• 16 years ago

I think this is related to Mandelbrot's different perspective to the world and seeing the fractal set as a kind of "chaos" geometry (kind of contradicting).

The expression "A Greek among Romans" is used maybe because Mandelbrot perspective to geometry was a bit different than the common scientific community in 1975-1985. There were many mentions about the "fractal set" just being "fancy" maths. He learned from the community while remaining unique in the community. But now there are many relationship with other model like "diffusion-limited aggregation" (DLA) and the fractal set is now one of the many models to describe our environment.

harscoat3• 16 years ago

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/

albertcardona2• 16 years ago

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.

joelmichael2• 16 years ago

Taleb evidently respects (ancient) Greeks and doesn't respect Romans, presumably because one group had enormous contributions to philosophy whereas the other was merely an economic and imperial superpower. He's calling regular philistines like you and me "Romans" as an insult, one he sees as particularly vulgar. Such pomp is standard behavior from him, and it shouldn't be validated.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

He's calling regular philistines like you and me "Romans" as an insult, one he sees as particularly vulgar.

Not even. Taleb values a combination of intellectual integrity, street smarts, empiricism, and humility in the face of uncertainty.

Far from considering ordinary people 'like you and me' to be philistines, he finds those traits he values in many different walks of life - from the Brooklyn born street-smart trader 'Fat Tony', to casino operators (their risk is not the actual games), to military planners (the risk managers with the most at stake).

He also finds the opposite - the Platonists (those who make the mistake of believing their highly complex yet nevertheless oversimplified models can reliably represent reality) and the philistines (people who value commerce above all else, and art, science, literature only for their capacity to make money or signal it, if at all) - everywhere as well. His particular targets are Wall Street, financial academia, and Economics Nobel, not 'you and me'.

He's quite clear on this in his books and writings.

HardyLeung2• 16 years ago

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.

mpiccino2• 16 years ago

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

HardyLeung2• 16 years ago

Don't mind at all.

jgrahamc• 16 years ago

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

palish3• 16 years ago

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

albertcardona2• 16 years ago

That reads like "Slaughterhouse five" by Vonnegut.

mpiccino2• 16 years ago

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.

harscoat3• 16 years ago

"RIP Beniot Mandelbrot, fractal man. Assume he's survived by a number of smaller versions of himself." Eliot Reuben / @ereuben

gregschlom• 16 years ago

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.

zacharyz• 16 years ago

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

binarymax• 16 years ago

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

iliketosleep• 16 years ago

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.

darwinGod• 16 years ago

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?

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

1+i minutes of silence for him.

systemtrigger• 16 years ago

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/

tomjen32• 16 years ago

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.

ANH2• 16 years ago

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.

ANH2• 16 years ago

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.

secret2• 16 years ago

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+1iy);

h_z=1:(stepsRstepsI); 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');

secret2• 16 years ago

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.

seancron2• 16 years ago

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

sesqu2• 16 years ago

I think I copied this from HN once. Paste to terminal:

  dc -e '[lolssdsl0lqx]sx[1+lddd*lld*-ls+dsdrll2**lo+dsld*rd*+4<kd15>q]sq[q]9ksk[d77/3*2-ss47lxx-P1+d78>0]s00[d23/.5-3*so0l0xr10P1+d24>u]dsux'

GFischer2• 16 years ago

There are some amazing images of fractals on the web.

One site that was pointed out here in particular was the Mandelbub, which looks amazing:

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

bcl• 16 years ago

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)

whackedspinach• 16 years ago

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.

aufreak3• 16 years ago

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

Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP

Related Stories