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Benoit Mandelbrot
Oct. 21st, 2010 11:06 pmVia, I think, Making Light: Rudy Rucker talks about meeting the late Benoit Mandelbrot.
I don't have much to say about Mandelbrot because I didn't know him and I don't think I even read any of his books, though he wrote a chapter or two in Peitgen and Saupe's The Science of Fractal Images, which I got a lot of use out of. But I do feel a debt to him, because the explosion of interest in fractal geometry in the 1980s fueled a lot of my youthful messing around with computer graphics, and led more or less directly to my present-day career (even though I don't do anything with fractals today). It was with a crude atmospheric simulation on vaguely fractal principles, entered in a county high-school science fair, that I made the connection that led to the summer job at NCAR that was my first programming gig. Later, while I was in college studying something else entirely, I taught myself C and GUI programming by writing a Mandelbrot set explorer and a fractal landscape generator for the Atari ST.
Mandelbrot was one of those figures who drives a lot of scientists crazy, the type who does a lot of his writing in a popular mode and gets more media attention than they think he deserves. And fractals (along with their close cousin, chaos theory) were definitely overhyped back then. Still, he brought together a body of preexisting mathematical work that had been regarded as isolated oddities, made some contributions of his own, and gave scientists a useful set of tools and vocabulary for thinking about lumpy, irregular or recursive objects in nature. Certainly CGI artists and moviemakers owe a lot to the explorations he opened up.
I don't have much to say about Mandelbrot because I didn't know him and I don't think I even read any of his books, though he wrote a chapter or two in Peitgen and Saupe's The Science of Fractal Images, which I got a lot of use out of. But I do feel a debt to him, because the explosion of interest in fractal geometry in the 1980s fueled a lot of my youthful messing around with computer graphics, and led more or less directly to my present-day career (even though I don't do anything with fractals today). It was with a crude atmospheric simulation on vaguely fractal principles, entered in a county high-school science fair, that I made the connection that led to the summer job at NCAR that was my first programming gig. Later, while I was in college studying something else entirely, I taught myself C and GUI programming by writing a Mandelbrot set explorer and a fractal landscape generator for the Atari ST.
Mandelbrot was one of those figures who drives a lot of scientists crazy, the type who does a lot of his writing in a popular mode and gets more media attention than they think he deserves. And fractals (along with their close cousin, chaos theory) were definitely overhyped back then. Still, he brought together a body of preexisting mathematical work that had been regarded as isolated oddities, made some contributions of his own, and gave scientists a useful set of tools and vocabulary for thinking about lumpy, irregular or recursive objects in nature. Certainly CGI artists and moviemakers owe a lot to the explorations he opened up.