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Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP
- edkennedy 16y agoAhh if only we could discuss things in never ending complexity. Here's to the father of fractals.
- GICodeWarrior 16y agoRIP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0
- seancron 16y agoThis is the full Mandelbrot Set song by Jonathan Coulton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPQ1l4sCjY 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 http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/909
- colonelxc 16y agoThe song is free on Coulton's website: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set
- mrdoob2 16y ago:(
- mrdoob2 16y agoSource: http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=121588367899802&id=13012333374 http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=12158836789...
- waterlesscloud 16y agoThere are some things that literally change how you perceive the world. Learning about fractal geometry is one of those things. Farewell, sir!
- nhebb 16y agoThe NOVA episode on fractals (and Mandelbrot) was one the of best NOVA's that I've watched: http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/ http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/
- mgunes 16y agoAs recommended viewing I'd add Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon's "Fractals: The Colors of Infinity", presented by Arthur C. Clarke.
- stevenrace 16y agoBenoit speaking on 'Roughness' at MIT (140min): http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/52 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/52
- ciupicri 16y agoWe're sorry, but this video is not available in your region due to rights restriction
- jacquesm 16y agoWow, 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.
- palish 16y agoHe 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 16y agoSo 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_Methods_of_Rationality 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.
- palish 16y agoOh, certainly. And people living until 85/100 has become common only recently (relatively speaking). I'm merely mourning the emotional complex of otherwise-logical humans. I happened to have a frustrating week due to coworkers being unwilling to think about logical benefits of proposed solutions, letting their emotions overwhelm their judgement. "Schedule feature requests? Schedules cause pain, anguish, and suffering; also monsters will materialize and devour your soul. Your whole soul. Scheduling is out of the question. P.S. I assigned you a bug to get done before tomorrow evening (seriously). Drop your multi-week project and work on that, now. Don't worry, I cleared it with the lead programmer." So when I read the top comment of the top article on HN, and realized it was negatively charged with emotion, I suppose I got a little cynical. :)
- webspiderus 16y agoLearning about the fractional dimension of the coast of Britain was one of the most interesting discoveries I've had. :(
- hugh3 16y agoI 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 16y ago"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth ..." -Benoit Mandelbrot
- rcavezza 16y agoCan someone explain "A Greek among Romans" from Taleb's homepage? Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010 A Greek among Romans
- DTrejo 16y agoIt has to do with platonicity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy#Relation_to_Platonicity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy#Relation_to_Plato...
- harscoat 16y agoSorry 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 16y agoI 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.
- harscoat 16y agoIt 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/ http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
- HardyLeung 16y agoHere's my tribute to Benoit Mandelbrot (text from Wikipedia): http://i.imgur.com/RoZ1j.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RoZ1j.jpg Interactive version: http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/87f79fa9bb6340be 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.
- mpiccino 16y agoThat's awesome. I hope you don't mind that I linked to it.
- HardyLeung 16y agoDon't mind at all.
- jgrahamc 16y agoHe's not dead, he's just transformed into a similar form at a different level of zoom.
- palish 16y agoRandom thought: Every human is a fractal, and our age is our level of zoom.
- albertcardona 16y agoThat reads like "Slaughterhouse five" by Vonnegut.
- mpiccino 16y agoThat'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.
- harscoat 16y ago"RIP Beniot Mandelbrot, fractal man. Assume he's survived by a number of smaller versions of himself." Eliot Reuben / @ereuben
- gregschlom 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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 http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractint.html
- binarymax 16y agoGoodbye professor. You were, and will remain, one of my greatest inspirations.
- iliketosleep 16y agoeven 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 16y agoDoes 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?
- rbanffy 16y ago1+i minutes of silence for him.
- systemtrigger 16y agoWhat 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/ http://www.walterthebus.org/the-scoop/tribe-walter/
- tomjen3 16y agoI 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/ http://jogamp.org/jocl/www/ (it is one of the demos). It requires OpenCL.
- ANH 16y agoHis '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.
- ANH 16y agoThe 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.
- secret 16y agoIn 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');
- bcl 16y agoNYT has confirmed it - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html 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)
- freyrs 16y agoMandelbrot has converged but his set iterates on. RIP
- whackedspinach 16y agoThis 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.
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- aufreak3 16y agoMandelbrot 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 http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals.html