Complexity Digest 2010.22 - 08

2010/10/22

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

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Benoît B Mandelbrot: the man who made geometry an art, guardian.co.uk Bookmark and Share

Excerpt: Few recent thinkers have woven such a beautiful braid of art and science as Benoît B Mandelbrot, who has died aged 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The B apparently doesn't stand for anything. He just felt like adding it.) Mandelbrot was a provocative mathematician, a subversive geometer. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals â€" those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind. They are icons of modern understanding of the universe's complexity.