Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Professor Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010)

"Mandelbrot was a modern Leonardo, a man who showed the beauty in nature. He was a prophet of the curving universe and gave us, in the endlessly playful geometry of fractals, a visual lexicon for our complex world."
Jonathan Jones on Art



The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982)

"More a reference than a read, Mandelbrot was the first mathematician and naturalist to embrace fractals, second citizen equations that turned out to be elegant expressions of much of the patterns, sequences, arrangements we can see in molecules, simple life forms, organ systems, complex life forms, environments, ecosystems.... Some of it is user friendly, some needs to be skimmed by those who don't care about the math, but Mandelbrot is supportive of both kinds of readers."