mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85

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Moegames

Banned
RIP brother

Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, developed fractals as a mathematical way of understanding the infinite complexity of nature.

The concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy.

Mandelbrot's family said he had died in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The visionary mathematician was born into a Jewish family in Poland but moved to Paris at the age of 11 to escape the Nazis.

He spent most of his life in the US, working for IBM computers and eventually became a professor of mathematical science at Yale University.

His seminal work, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, was published in 1982. In it, he argued that seemingly random mathematical shapes in fact followed a pattern if broken down into a single repeating shape.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11560101
 
Honestly I only learnt about this guy after watching 'The Secret Life of Chaos' a few weeks ago, but RIP either way. Amazing stuff.
 
I learned about him way back in the days of school when we did some projects on image compression in some courses i took..most of the stuff we were working on was his work so i was always interested in the guy..he was very intelligent and his mind just boggles my mind ..just some of the concepts he developed boggles my mind.
 
I went to a lecture a couple of months ago about the Mandelbrot set, his work should not be underestimated he was one of the great minds in mathematics.
 
chris+benoit.jpg


In all seriousness, we need people like him and other geniuses to live as long as possible. Tis a shame :(
 
I was fascinated by fractals.

It was writing a Mandelbrot generator on a Casio graph plotting calculator (which took about 2 days to render!) that led to me writing a little tank game which eventually turned into Total Wormage on the Amiga. Which then became Worms.

Thank you Benoit Mandelbrot, not only for setting off that butterfly effect but for also changing how I saw maths, nature and the world around us.
 
Mandelbrot set--I'll never forget trying to teach that to 10th graders in my first year of teaching. Absolute nightmare.
 
I had to render the Mandelbrot set for a class

Fucking sucked as an assignment, but I can appreciate the genius and it's sad to hear him go.
 
Mandelbrot had a wonderful way of expressing mathematics. For example, I always thought of complex numbers in terms of orthogonality. On a recent TED talk, he offhandedly referred to complex numbers as "numbers on a plane".

It blew my mind for a week.


RIP...
 
First learned about Fractals in EGM actually, there was a cheat for Chip's Challenge for the Atari Lynx. I guess it's fitting that I hear of his death from a videogame forum, quite an impact he made.

Chip's Challenge Fractal Generator
Chip's Challenge has a secret. In its many codes for levels of play, there is a code which will allow you to enter into the infinite world of fractals. A fractal is a geometrical or physical structure that has an irregular or fragmented shape at all scales of measurement between a greatest and a smallest scale such that certain mathematical or physical properties of the structure are greater than the spatial dimensions. If you can understand the definition, that's what a fractal is.
Fractals were discovered by a man named Benoit Mandlebrot and he even named one of the images you'll see in this program after himself. There are lots of different images to be seen in this program, so don't just stay in one area. Now, on with the fun of fractals.

The code for entering the program is MAND. After it is entered. A picture will start to form on the screen. DON'T TOUCH ANY BUTTONS UNTIL THE PICTURE IS DONE. When it's done, then you can move around and zoom in to see more details. NOTE: Since each picture has extremely fine detail, it will usually take a few minutes for an image to form. Especially if there is black in ore around the picture.
 
NomarTyme said:
I love math... I wish I was good at math. RIP.

I actually feel the same way. Even if by some standards, I'm "good" at math; by other, probably better standards, I'm not really that good at all. But I really enjoy studying math (that is, when I'm not stressed out about handing in a problem set or taking a midterm the next day =().
 
DanteFox said:
alright. :lol

Yup, that's why I have a new avatar. Funny, I had my previous one for my entire GAF posting career up until this point and it never got quoted, and then I go and use this one and it gets quoted within a day or so of me changing it... Maybe I should have posted in more threads about guinea pigs being evil...
 
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