You Do the Math

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, mathematical cherry picker, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. Known as the father of fractal geometry because he coined the term for a branch of mathematics with roots dating to the 17th century, Mandelbrot described a fractal as an object whose Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimension is greater than its topological dimension. Pretty fancy talk for mathematical patterns that are basically used to decorate the dorm room walls of freshmen at MIT and CalTech, as well as populate forwards from my mother. Essentially, fractals are pieces of an object or shape that, when removed from the whole, form a reduced size copy of the whole. Like Mini-Me and Dr. Evil. Or Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen. Mandelbrot used his fractals to explain cotton pricing, the “dark night sky” riddle and the Los Angeles Clippers, and argued that natural fractals in the shapes of mountains and the structures of lungs were more accurate than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry. Dr. Almond Bread wrote informally, rather than mathematically, including the aforementioned pretty pictures, making The Fractal Geometry of Nature accessible to non-specialists, sparking widespread popular interest in fractals and contributing to chaos theory and other fields of science and mathematics, such as the dull parts of Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park.