Excerpts from a 2008 interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals — rough mathematical shapes “whose uneven contours … mimic the irregularities found in nature” — who died today at 85.
I can stand loneliness. In fact, I’m rarely comfortable in a big crowd, because big crowds automatically are very specifically organized by dates, by tradition, by training. And I don’t sound like a mathematician. I don’t sound like a physicist either. Nor do I sound like an art critic. There’s very great strength in being a stranger, if one brings something new.
… Perhaps my early rootlessness gave me an awareness that one can live without being so completely specified.
… [A] large number of truths that I discovered did not result from purely mathematical deduction but from skilled examination of mathematical pictures.
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I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes…
October 18th, 2010 at 5:47PM
Thanks so much for posting the link to the interview, UD.
October 18th, 2010 at 5:53PM
My pleasure, Aunt Deb.