A fascinating memoir from the man who revitalized visual
geometry, and whose ideas about fractals have changed how we look
at both the natural world and the financial world.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry, has
significantly improved our understanding of, among other things,
financial variability and erratic physical phenomena. In "The
Fractalist, " Mandelbrot recounts the high points of his life with
exuberance and an eloquent fluency, deepening our understanding of
the evolution of his extraordinary mind. We begin with his early
years: born in Warsaw in 1924 to a Lithuanian Jewish family,
Mandelbrot moved with his family to Paris in the 1930s, where he
was mentored by an eminent mathematician uncle. During World War
II, as he stayed barely one step ahead of the Nazis until France
was liberated, he studied geometry on his own and dreamed of using
it to solve fresh, real-world problems. We observe his unusually
broad education in Europe, and later at Caltech, Princeton, and
MIT. We learn about his thirty-five-year affiliation with IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Research Center and his association with Harvard
and Yale. An outsider to mainstream scientific research, he managed
to do what others had thought impossible: develop a new geometry
that combines revelatory beauty with a radical way of unfolding
formerly hidden laws governing utter roughness, turbulence, and
chaos.
With full-color inserts and black-and-white photographs
throughout.
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