'Fractal' mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85
Quote:
...And now a Mandelbrot Fractal using XaoS, Mandelbrot forumala^5. |
Fractals are cool and all, and it's sad to hear about Mandelbrot's death (:(), but sometimes they get me all existentially anxious ("oh great, we're having broccoli with dinner tonight...here we go again: all of nature is one big fractal; my behavior is determined, ultimately, by Z = Zē + C." :rolleyes:).
|
Without Mandelbrot (OK, and assorted substances) those FSOL videos wouldn't have been that ultra-psychedelic. May he Live Forever.
|
I too was saddened by Benoit's demise - in saying that he did have a good innings though. I studied his work with great interest many years ago and wrote an 8088 assembler program to calculate and display a monochrome Mandelbrot set on a Victor Sirius under CP/M. That took ages both to write and to run, (Ok - so I'm old) :).
Quote:
To anyone whose not familiar with his stuff I recommend checking it out as much of it is fascinating - (albeit in a very "geeky" kind of way). The xfractint application is a good start. |
It is not Mandelbrot who discovered first 'fractal's. eg. there is a Cantor's curve (a graph of a some very specific function - Cantor's function), Sierpinski's carpet (also appears in screensavers). Fractal comes form 'a set of fractional dimension' say a line has dimension 1, a plane has dimension 2, etc. Fractal can have dimension eg. 1.2.
|
This story didn't imply that he was the first to discover fractals, however he did come up with unique fractal formulas.
|
Sorry, but what do you mean by uniq fractal formulas? Even a linear plane map can generate a 'fractal'. Mandelbrot
is well known first of all for conjectures about 'fractal' structure of the nature. There are things, phenomena in the nature which has a 'fractal' structure (eg. a tree). Mathematically Mandelbrot's 'fractal's are not really sophisticated. How to say, hm, there are in fact simple. |
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 03:48 PM. |