Benoit Mandelbrot interview
p2pnet.net News:- Benoit Mandelbrot is famous as the founder of fractal geometry
Now Sterling professor of mathematical sciences at Yale University, he turns 80 next week.
Valerie Jamieson recently interviewed him and the results are featured in New Scientist. Below, to give you a taste, are her first three questions, and Mandelbrot’s answers.
Jamieson: What is it like seeing the Mandelbrot set emblazoned on T-shirts and posters?
Mandelbrot: I’m delighted. I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities – and not for the common mortal – was a very bad idea.
Jamieson: Even though most people view it as a beautiful image and ignore the underlying mathematics?
Mandelbrot:That’s right. Yet there is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.
Jamieson: How did you feel when you discovered it?
Mandelbrot: Its astounding complication was completely out of proportion with what I was expecting. Here is the curious thing: the first night I saw the set, it was just wild. The second night, I became used to it. After a few nights, I became familiar with it. It was as if somehow I had seen it before. Of course I hadn’t. No one had seen it. No one had described it. The fact that a certain aspect of its mathematical nature remains mysterious, despite hundreds of brilliant people working on it, is the icing on the cake to me.
He also says:
"What motivates me now are ideas I developed 10, 20 or 30 years ago, and the feeling that these ideas may be lost if I don’t push them a little bit further. Does that matter? Most ideas in science that are abandoned are picked up by someone else later, but not all. I have reflected on this issue a great deal. Perhaps I would like to finish my ideas for aesthetic reasons – a feeling of closure."
What’s he working on now?
"My work is more varied than at any other point in my life. I am still carrying out research in pure mathematics. And I am working on an idea that I had several years ago on negative dimensions."
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See:-
a simple iterative formula – A fractal life, New Scientist
