Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist"

In 1936, at the age of 11, Mandelbrot and his family emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, to France. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and in the United States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.

Because of his access to IBM's computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1979-1980. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be "rough", a "mess", or "chaotic", such as clouds or shorelines, actually had a "degree of order".

Toward the end of his career, he was the Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale's history to receive tenure. Mandelbrot also held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Université Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During his career he received over 15 honorary doctorates, served on many science journals, and won numerous awards. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, was published posthumously in 2012.

Early years

Benedykt Mandelbrot was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw during the Second Polish Republic. His father made his living trading clothing; his mother was a dental surgeon. During his first two school years, he was tutored privately by an uncle who despised rote learning: "Most of my time was spent playing chess, reading maps and learning how to open my eyes to everything around me."

In 1936, when he was 11, the family emigrated from Poland to France. The move, World War II, and the influence of his father's brother, the mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (who had moved to Paris around 1920), further prevented a standard education. "The fact that my parents, as economic and political refugees, joined Szolem in France saved our lives," he writes.

Mandelbrot attended the Lycée Rollin (now the Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour) in Paris until the start of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, France, where he enrolled in Lycée Edmond Perrier. He was helped by Rabbi David Feuerwerker, the Rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, to continue his studies. Much of France was occupied by the Nazis at the time, and Mandelbrot recalls this period:

The (Mandelbrot Set) song's pre-chorus describes a mathematical equation that is not the Mandelbrot set, to which Coulton has said, "if any of you are mathematicians and you're just waiting anxiously to come up to me afterwards and point out the fact that the equation is not quite right, that I actually described a Julia set, and not a Mandelbrot set, I already know that shit."

Mandelbrot appears in the Epstein files. Less than two years removed from his initial sentencing in Florida, in an email exchange Epstein offered $50,000 for Mandelbrot's papers. Mandelbrot ultimately postponed selling his papers, giving his declining health as reason. A meeting was scheduled in Cambridge on Sept. 12, 2010. The pair were also photographed together at some point at Epstein's New York City home.