prodil89 Posted October 17, 2010 Report Posted October 17, 2010 Benoît Mandelbrot, Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85His 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: ,” 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.”In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.” More....[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=1[/url]Wikipedia....[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt_Mandelbrot]Benoît Mandelbrot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/url] Quote
