37 Facts About Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit B Mandelbrot 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".

Benoit Mandelbrot spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship.

Benoit Mandelbrot showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules.

Benoit Mandelbrot held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Universite Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Benedykt Benoit Mandelbrot was born in a Lithuanian Jewish family, in Warsaw during the Second Polish Republic.

Benoit Mandelbrot's father made his living trading clothing; his mother was a dental surgeon.

Benoit Mandelbrot attended the Lycee Rollin in Paris until the start of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, France.

Benoit Mandelbrot 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 Benoit Mandelbrot recalls this period:.

In 1944, Benoit Mandelbrot returned to Paris, studied at the Lycee du Parc in Lyon, and in 1945 to 1947 attended the Ecole Polytechnique, where he studied under Gaston Julia and Paul Levy.

From 1949 to 1958, Benoit Mandelbrot was a staff member at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Benoit Mandelbrot remained at IBM for 35 years, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus.

From 1951 onward, Benoit Mandelbrot worked on problems and published papers not only in mathematics but in applied fields such as information theory, economics, and fluid dynamics.

Benoit Mandelbrot saw financial markets as an example of "wild randomness", characterized by concentration and long range dependence.

Benoit Mandelbrot developed several original approaches for modelling financial fluctuations.

In 1975, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures and first published his ideas in the French book Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension, later translated in 1977 as Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension.

Benoit Mandelbrot used the term "fractal" as it derived from the Latin word "fractus", defined as broken or shattered glass.

Benoit Mandelbrot saw himself as a "would-be Kepler", after the 17th-century scientist Johannes Kepler, who calculated and described the orbits of the planets.

Benoit Mandelbrot never felt he was inventing a new idea.

Benoit Mandelbrot described his feelings in a documentary with science writer Arthur C Clarke:.

In 1982, Benoit Mandelbrot expanded and updated his ideas in The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

Benoit Mandelbrot left IBM in 1987, after 35 years and 12 days, when IBM decided to end pure research in his division.

Benoit Mandelbrot joined the Department of Mathematics at Yale, and obtained his first tenured post in 1999, at the age of 75.

Benoit Mandelbrot created the first-ever "theory of roughness", and he saw "roughness" in the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies.

Benoit Mandelbrot began by asking himself various kinds of questions related to nature:.

Benoit Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models for describing many "rough" phenomena in the real world.

Benoit Mandelbrot brought these objects together for the first time and turned them into essential tools for the long-stalled effort to extend the scope of science to explaining non-smooth, "rough" objects in the real world.

Benoit Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry:.

Benoit Mandelbrot has been called an artist, and a visionary and a maverick.

Benoit Mandelbrot offered in 1974 a new explanation of Olbers' paradox, demonstrating the consequences of fractal theory as a sufficient, but not necessary, resolution of the paradox.

Benoit Mandelbrot postulated that if the stars in the universe were fractally distributed, it would not be necessary to rely on the Big Bang theory to explain the paradox.

Benoit Mandelbrot's awards include the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993, the Lewis Fry Richardson Prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, the Japan Prize in 2003, and the Einstein Lectureship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006.

The small asteroid 27500 Benoit Mandelbrot was named in his honor.

In December 2005, Benoit Mandelbrot was appointed to the position of Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Benoit Mandelbrot was promoted to an Officer of the Legion of Honour in January 2006.

Benoit Mandelbrot died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85 in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 14 October 2010.