Benoît Mandelbrot was born in Poland in 1924 to a Jewish family. His father made a living buying and selling clothes, while his mother was a doctor. The Mandelbrot family emigrated to France in 1936 and his uncle Szolem Mandelbrot , who was a mathematics teacher at the Collège de France, assumed responsibility for the young Benoît’s education. Mandelbrot attended the Lyceum Rolin in Paris until the beginning of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, in central France, and lived in hiding. At this time he stayed away from school and university, which forced him to be self-taught . Although challenging at the time, Mandelbrot attributed much of his later success to this unconventional education.
SEE PHOTOS OF FRACTALS
In 1944 he entered the Polytechnic School, where he studied under the direction of Paul Lévy, another character who strongly influenced Mandelbrot. He eventually visited the California Institute of Technology and, after a doctorate from the University of Paris, went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he was sponsored by John von Neumann. Mandelbrot returned to France in 1955 and worked at the National Center for Scientific Research. In 1958 he left for the United States permanently and began his longest and most fruitful collaboration with IBM as an IBM Fellow in its New York laboratories. IBM provided Mandelbrot with an environment that allowed him to explore a wide variety of different ideas, “an opportunity that no university position could have given him,” in his own words. Throughout his life he was also Professor of Engineering at Yale University, Professor of Mathematics in Paris, Professor of Economics at Harvard, and Professor of Physiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Fractals everywhere
But why did it cover such a variety of disciplines? Because he had discovered fractal geometry . Fractal (from the Latin fractus , “irregular”, “fragmented”) is a word that Mandelbrot himself coined to describe the “infinite” repetition of geometric patterns at different scales, showing smaller and smaller versions of themselves . The small parts of a fractal, Mandelbrot explained, are similar to the whole, the complete set. The most interesting thing is that the mathematician showed that most of the forms of nature are fractals. Fractals have been used to explain atmospheric phenomena , to analyze vascular networks and neural networks of the human body, to calculate the length of coastlines, to explain the growth of mammalian brains , to study earthquakes … Even in telecommunications, fractal antennas have been designed.
The Mandelbrot findings also apply to visual arts (most computer-generated objects today are based on some version of Mandelbrotian fractals) and architecture , and can be glimpsed in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Emily Dickinson’s poetry. (where big looks like small), to name a few examples. In addition, they are required for digital image compression .
With his fractals, Mandelbrot became so popular that all manner of artists attended his talks, earning him the nickname “the rock star of mathematics .”
