Benoît Mandelbrot has died

Benoît Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry and chaos theory, has died last thursday. The idea of self-similarity in nature and mathematics is described in his great book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.


The picture above shows the Mandelbrot set, a set of points in the complex plane, the border of the set is a fractal.


Not only coastlines, fern, and the vegatable romanesco exhibit self-similarity, but also stock price charts. Mandelbrot describes a fascinating, unorthodox view on finacial theory in his book The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward.


Mandelbrot's TEDTalk from 2010.