A coastline looks just as jagged from space as at your feet
Benoit Mandelbrot noticed that clouds, coastlines and even cotton prices share a hidden kind of order: they stay equally rough however closely you look. He named such shapes fractals, and with IBM's computers turned simple equations into images of endless intricacy, including the famous set that bears his name.
Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw in 1924 to a Lithuanian Jewish family; his father traded clothing and his mother was a dental surgeon. An uncle who despised rote learning tutored him with chess and maps. In 1936 the family moved to France to join another uncle, the mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt, a decision Mandelbrot said saved their lives. During the Nazi occupation they lived in fear of denunciation in the town of Tulle, where a rabbi helped him keep studying.
After the war he studied at the École Polytechnique under Gaston Julia and Paul Lévy, earned a master's in aeronautics at Caltech and a doctorate in Paris in 1952. He spent a year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study sponsored by John von Neumann and worked with Jean Piaget in Geneva. In 1958 he joined IBM, beginning a 35-year career there. His interests roamed across information theory, economics and fluid dynamics.
Markets fascinated him. He found that price swings do not follow the familiar bell curve but a wilder distribution with extreme jumps; cotton prices, for instance, fitted a pattern with a parameter of 1.7 instead of the 2 a bell curve implies. He called this wild randomness. In 1975 he coined the word fractal, from the Latin fractus, broken, and published his ideas in French, translated in 1977 as Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. As a visiting professor at Harvard he used computers to plot shapes studied earlier by Julia and Pierre Fatou, and he began visualising the Mandelbrot set in late 1979, publishing on it in 1980.
Stephen Wolfram notes how odd it is that such a basic form of regularity, the nesting of ever smaller copies of a pattern seen in ferns and Romanesco broccoli, rose to prominence largely through one man's work. Late in life Mandelbrot became the oldest professor to receive tenure at Yale. He died in 2010.
Source: Benoit Mandelbrot
