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Friday, October 22, 2010

Benoit Mandelbrot R.I.P







I know I said my next update was going to include more Droste effect, but over the last week, a very important figure passed away. Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the Mandelbrot set, died at the age of 85. Coining the term "fractal" he set into motion an idea that changed chaos math as we know it.
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Benoit's main complaint was that in general math treated the world as a very smooth, made up of spheres and planes. While as we know nothing can be a perfect plane. Theses fractals that mandelbrot brought to life showed that chaos does actually have a sort of order to it. Fractals are circular in nature. And they're math equations demonstrate this. When you get an answer, you plug it into the first equation and you can do this infinitely. He proposed that everything in human nature, including patterns in nature itself are never smooth and perfect. Upon close inspection, everything is made of jagged edges, ups and downs and unique patterns. Even the cosmo's and the gathering of galaxies, and clusters of stars, Mandelbrot explained through his theory. What I love about fractals, is that the more you zoom in on the it, the deeper it goes. There's quite a few Youtube video's that display pretty cool Fractals. In Douglass Rushkoff's book "Cyberia" He describes how the Fractal is sort of the 'symbol' for the hacker, and cyber culture community. He leaves behind his iconic Mandelbrot set and the Julia set, which changed Geometry for the better.
Check out a few links to his biography and some fractals

http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/cgi-bin/expl.cgi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=1

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

3 comments:

  1. I read about Fractals a few days ago in regards to Mandelbrot and his recent death.

    I found this program by watching some youtube videos of fractals. Give it a try, it's free, and allows you to create your own fractals.

    http://xaos.sourceforge.net/english.php

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  2. thanks, pretty awesome link..I'll have to download it later on

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  3. Newer version of it is found here:

    http://wmi.math.u-szeged.hu/xaos/doku.php

    ReplyDelete