Now that he is dead.
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85
He’s the fractals dude if you don’t know.
crunch some numbers in his memory.
The OP’s title, btw, is a reference to this song.
Awwww… I remember when I discovered fractals and found great metaphysical enlightenment in the Mendelbrot Ganesha.
Some how, that proved to me that there was God In Science (or vice-versa).
Wow. I remember learning about and being fascinated with fractals and the Mandelbrot Set in my late teens. Another pioneer who helped to enhance my understanding of and interest in mathematics is gone. I find this to be very sad news.
This would be a great Google tribute occasion
Brian
The nice folks at TED linked to one of his lectures from February. Fascinating. RIP.
Been a long time since I thought about him, and when I did computers were very slow and computing a view took a long time. I have a much faster computer now with multiple processors. Are there any free Windows programs to explore the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, preferable ones that use all my processors?
I never understood why Mandelbrot fractals were such a big deal. Mystifying wiggly shapes, regular and yet random. Or something incomprehensible like that.
Well they’re not random. What’s fascinating about them is it’s a very simple formula that when graphed on the complex plane makes pretty pictures. And you can zoom in on these pictures again and again and get repeated patterns, no matter how far you zoom in. If you’ve ever seen a Mandelbrot screensaver you know how hypnotic they can be.
I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Mandelbrot when I was in high school. I was part of a program at my school that went to IBM’s TJ Watson Labs in Hawthorne every Saturday to hear a different research scientist give a brief lecture about their work. Mandelbrot wasn’t one of the lecturers, but he stopped by to deliver a few words after the lecture of another mathematician who was working on something uninteresting that I don’t remember. I shook his hand and all I could think of to say was “I love your screensaver!” He found that hilarious and thanked me.
No, he’s not in heaven.
He’s headed there, but unfortunately is on an infintely regressive loop.
Mandelbrot has just set off from one end of the coastline of Britain, and heaven is at the other end, so it’ll take him a while.
Loved this bit from the NYT obit:
Heh. 
The thing is, traveling along the edge of a fractal plane, whether heaven is on the other end of the British coastline, or an inch away, he will never get there.
Poor Dr. Mandelbrot; always moving forward, yet trapped forever at the beginning of his journey.