Benoit Mandelbrot, a French-American mathematician who explored a new class of mathematical shapes known as ”fractals,” has died at age 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
His wife Aliette told the newspaper he died of pancreatic cancer at a hospice.
His seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, argued that irregular mathematical objects once dismissed as “pathological” were a reflection of nature.
Measuring the unmeasurable
The fractal geometry he developed would be used to measure natural phenomena like clouds or coastlines that once were believed to be unmeasurable.
He applied the theory to physics, biology, finance and many other fields of study.
“Fractals are easy to explain, it's like a romanesco cauliflower, which is to say that each small part of it is exactly the same as the entire cauliflower itself,” Catherine Hill, a statistician at the Gustave Roussy Institute, told AFP.
Reproducing infinity
“It's a curve that reproduces itself to infinity. Every time you zoom in further, you find the same curve,” she said.
David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University, told the Times that Mr. Mandelbrot had effectively revolutionised his field.
“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,” the paper quoted him as saying.
“He was one of the primary people who realised these were legitimate objects,” Mr. Mumford added
Reactions
Mathematicians and economists were among those who reacted swiftly to Mr. Mandelbrot's death on the Internet.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, statistician and philosopher best known for the book “The Black Swan,” turned over his website to mourn Mr. Mandelbrot's passing.
Chris Anderson, organiser of the TED conferences that feature addresses from prominent thinkers drawn from a variety of fields, offered his condolences on his Twitter page.
He described Mr. Mandelbrot, who addressed the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference earlier this year, as “an icon who changed how we see the world”.
A professor emeritus at Yale University, Mr. Mandelbrot was born in Poland but as a child moved with his family to France where he was educated.
In the United States and around the world, his work attracted the attention of academics, but also pop culture because the fractals he uncovered could be illustrated in stunningly beautiful, multi-coloured representations.
