Mandelbrot Monkey

The name of the blog Mandelbrot Monkey comes from one of my scientific idols, Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010).  Mandelbrot is credited with coining the phrase "fractal" and unifying the field of fractal geometry.  He was interested in the roughness of natural patterns, and observed "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does light travel in a straight line." Fractals, he argued, could describe these natural patterns.  Nature was not outside of the realm of mathematics.

His story is an interesting one - he spent some of his youth as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France.  After finding it hard to fit into academia, he began working for IBM.  With access to computers, he was one of the first to create fractal images with computer graphics, demonstrating that complex visual patterns can arise for simple rules reiterated over and over again.  At first, his work involving fractals was rejected by the mathematical community, who dismissed his work as being not much more than pretty pictures from a computing machine.  However, in his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature, he was able to argue the utility of fractals in understanding the natural world.  Today, fractals have trickled into countless fields of study (economics, graphic design, engineering, biology, animal behavior, etc). His non traditional thinking and perseverance has given us a new way to think about nature, which guides many of my own research interests.

"All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year I can play on my age and provoke people even more."  - Benoit Mandelbrot