Benoît Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot’s upbringing was as irregular as the fractal worlds he explored. Born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw in 1924, he fled from the Nazis with his family in 1936 — first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools. As a Polish émigré in France, and then as a French émigré in the US after World War II, his schooling was irregular and discontinuous. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, returned to Paris for his doctorate in mathematics in 1952, then went on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he did research.

In 1958, Mandelbrot took a position at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he was asked to examine the problem of extraneous “noise” in IBM’s electronic transmission lines. He discovered that the noise tended to appear in bunches, with patterns that remained constant whether plotted by the second or by the hour.

There was a larger structure at work. This type of activity — measuring structures and making sense of seeming chaos — would become Mandelbrot’s life’s work. The net result was nothing less than a new geometry of the cosmos.

It wasn’t until Mandelbrot’s 1982 book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, in which he highlighted the many occurrences of fractal objects in nature, that his insights would receive widespread attention. Each split in a tree — from trunk to limb to branch to twig — is remarkably similar, yet subtle differences provide increasing detail, complexity and insight into the inner workings of the entire tree.

Mandelbrot’s work touched off a revolution in the study of turbulence and disorder across science, industry and art. For millennia, the human heart was believed to beat in a regular, linear fashion, but studies have shown that the true rhythm of a healthy heart fluctuates in a distinctively fractal pattern. Blood is also distributed throughout the body in a fractal manner, and researchers have created mathematical models of blood flows for early detection of cancerous cells.

Fractal-based antennae that pick up the widest range of known frequencies are now used in many wireless devices. Graphic design and image editing programs use fractals to create stunningly lifelike landscapes for films. Climate scientists perform fractal statistical analyses of forests that measure and quantify how much carbon dioxide the world can safely process.

In recognition of his groundbreaking work, Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and numerous awards, including the Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science, past recipients of which include Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Throughout his career, Mandelbrot cherished his role as an outsider who questioned conventional wisdom and remained on the periphery of traditional dogmas.

Even after living in America for decades, he claimed not to know the alphabet, and that having to use a telephone book reduced him to near helplessness. “From the very beginning, his angle has been to show people that they were making faulty assumptions simply because they didn’t have the tools to look beyond them,” noted Mumford.

Mandelbrot died in 2010 at age 85. He often credited his pioneering work on fractal geometry to his own life’s seemingly chaotic pattern. “Every discovery I made while at IBM fell well outside the scope of any university department,” Mandelbrot said. “I did not add new fields because of boredom or coercion, but because of new opportunities.”