Communications of the ACM
Beno
Graphic representations of the Mandelbrot set have been implanted in popular culture, gracing T-shirts and album covers.
Wolfgang Beyer
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.
His death was caused by pancreatic cancer, his wife, Aliette, said. He had lived in Cambridge.
Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.
"Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found," said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. "He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study."
From The New York Times
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