Benoit Mandelbrot Dies At 85 131
Beetle B. writes "Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at the age of 85. I first learned of the Mandelbrot set while reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From The Grand Banks. Soon after, I got hold of the best fractal generation software of the day — Fractint — and ran it for long periods of time on my XT, exploring the beautiful world that Mandelbrot, among others, had opened up for me. That it was only on a 4-color CGA did not deter me!"
From Life ... (Score:4, Funny)
to the Hausdorf Dimension!
Fractal mathematicians don't die (Score:2)
The keep splitting themselves into even fractionally dimensioned smaller pieces
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And lesser fleas have smaller fleas, so on ad infinitum.
Re: Fractal mathematicians don't die (Score:3, Funny)
If reincarnation is true, he'll come back as twins.
Fractals are addictive. Like SWINTH for the Commode64, watching a fire, or Hypnotoad.
Re:Fractal mathematicians don't die (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm going to assume you're a believer. I'm not. I'm also not the AC from up above, but I agree with a fair bit of what he said.
Suppose a god did "eliminate hunger". So, now the six billion people are nice and full and don't have to worry about starving to death. With all this food but without any restraint, there would be an explosion of births as there is suddenly nutrition to support 12 billion, 18 billion, or more.
(snip)
The same reasoning applies to disease. Disease does a generally good job at population control, this was set in place presumably by god to moderate the effects of a species population explosion.
So what you're telling me here, is that your all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god couldn't come up with any better way to keep the population down than through starvation and disease? Mass suffering and death is not a kind way to prevent overpopulation; it's the cruellest possible way - with omnipotence you could just adjust the fertility rate so that excess children wouldn't
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Re:From Life ... (Score:4, Funny)
Good luck using Google Maps to zoom in on his graveyard.
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Have you tried Google Maths?
Dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't know he was still alive. So much for assumptions.
Re:Dead? (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't know he was still alive. So much for assumptions.
I only knew he was still alive because of this song.
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set [jonathancoulton.com]
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.
Re:Dead? (Score:4, Funny)
And if anyone knows about still being alive, it's Jonathan Coulton.
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He did the Portal song?
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"Mandelbrot's in Heaven.
At least, he is now that he's dead.
When I first wrote this song, he was teaching math at Yale."
Could probably be cleaned up to be more respectful but this gets the point across and fits the beat of the song.
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Damn, beaten by several days:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1824236&cid=33918164 [slashdot.org]
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Yes, but he replicates in ever smaller iterations.
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I didn't know he was still alive. So much for assumptions.
This news is quite surreal... almost like it's half real and half imaginary.
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Check out the obit on the New York Times (Score:4, Funny)
You can use your browser to zoom into it infinitely revealing more patterns.
From his February 2010 TED visit (Score:5, Informative)
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I saw a similar presentation he gave in 2007. We need more people like him.
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I listened to that TED podcast a few weeks ago, I found it really interesting, but I was driving at the time, and once getting home it had completely slipped my mind to read more in to it.
His presentation was excellent, and it didn't occur to me that he was nearly that old.
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Thanks! More years ago than I care to remember (about the same time I was playing around with Fractint from a covermount floppy of some magazine) the great man came to our university to give a talk. Stupidly I didn't join the queue early enough and got stuck in an overflow room (the maths guys hosting his visit hadn't calculated the demand correctly). Still cool to hear him talk, though. I remember the Genesis Device got a mention:
http://vimeo.com/5810737 [vimeo.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM1r37zIBOQ [youtube.com]
Testimony (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yep, that's how I learned Asm on the C64. Kept moving parts of the BASIC code to machine. I leaned a lot about optimization that way, stuff that has stayed with me for decades.
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I put the pseudocode into Atari Basic on my trusty 800XL (1.86kHz)
I think you mean something megahertz. A one kilohertz computer wouldn't be good for much of anything. The Apple II, C-64, Atari 400/800, etc. all ran 1 Mhz 6502 CPUs at approximately 1 Mhz, somewhat more than that in the Atari case.
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I remember those days - reading his book on the "Fractal complexity of nature" was a real inspiration. It was strange to realize that snowflakes, ice crystallisation, mountain terrain, the outlines of coastlines, branching of trees and lightning, aggregation of soot particles, growth of coral and seashells, periodicity of landslides and earthquakes could all be modelled by fractals.
Some of those simulations could be done within seconds on an Atari(XL) or other home computer. Others took hours like the Mande
I feel a little bad about this (Score:1)
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I feel a little bad about this but the first thing I thought was, "damn, that one Jonathan Coulton song is going to be really confusing whenever he performs it now."
Can't be worse than immediately thinking "I must post the best yo dawg joke ever." You know, he put the Mandelbrot Set in the Mandelbrot Set, so we can explore it while we explore it.
From this day forward, this recursive meme ought to be associated with Mandelbrot. After all, he put something inside itself infinitely many times long before Xzibit did so once.
Fractint (Score:2)
Is there anything better than Fractint now? I too played with it for ages on a clunky old IBM PC with clicky keyboard and Windows 2 (although Fractint ran in DOS though, I think, and necessitated misc tweaking with graphics drivers to make it work, you kids don't know how lucky you are...)
Re:Fractint (Score:5, Informative)
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The thing is, there's fundamentally nothing you can see at a high zoom level that doesn't look very similar to features visible somewhere at lower magnification. After you zoom in a dozen times, the floating point arithmetic bugs are suddenl
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Is there anything better than Fractint now? I too played with it for ages on a clunky old IBM PC with clicky keyboard and Windows 2 (although Fractint ran in DOS though, I think, and necessitated misc tweaking with graphics drivers to make it work, you kids don't know how lucky you are...)
You have the open-source "xaos" http://xaos.sf.net/ [sf.net] for a fast interactive fractal exploring and "Fraqtive", http://fraqtive.mimec.org/ [mimec.org] for a beautiful view generator. Also, there are new versions of fractint, but the UI is really outdated. Wikipedia has a list with a few more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software [wikipedia.org]
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I just looked around the Ubuntu repositories for nostalgia's sake and found Fraqtive (http://fraqtive.mimec.org/). It looks pretty slick, uses multiple cores and SSE instructions to get you there faster, Win/Mac/Linux.
The last 3 minutes of exploring would have taken weeks on my Apple II.
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Not exactly interactive, but still quite nice concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Sheep [wikipedia.org]
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Aren't electric sheep the objects androids dream about?
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...or PCs, it would seem.
Anyway, I just remembered one more shiny: http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~keenan/project_qjulia.html [caltech.edu] (in "Ports" few variants which might be more to your liking; this page [skynet.be] includes also "2D" mandelbrot and julia gpu viewer)
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KaiRo made a SeaMonkey extension Mandelbrot explorer. Probably works in FF as well.
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Another one for Gnofract. The customization options are crazy good.
Mandelbrot's in heaven... (Score:1)
That it was only on a 4-color CGA did not deter me (Score:2)
Poor guy. Those of us with our $150 or $300 Commodores and Ataris ran the fractals in gorgeous 16 or 128 colors. Perfect example of how cheaper products can be better than those $100 PCs or $3000 Apples.
I got bored with fractals quickly. The odd shapes they generated were pretty, but I found the graphix demos generated by pirate groups to be far more interesting.
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Correction:
>>>$1,000 PCs
RIP (Score:1)
Eight months ago he gave a ted talk describing his work [ted.com]. If you want to explore fractals for yourself, I recommend GNU XaoS [u-szeged.hu] for all platforms.
Another Mandelbrot - Clarke connection (Score:3, Interesting)
I first learned of the Mandelbrot set while watching one of Clarke documentaries, Fractals: the colours of infinity - very nicely done; very inspiring(*), as was the performance (despite its shortness) of Benoit Mandelbrot himself.
Now both gone :/
(*)perhaps too inspiring - I still wait for something like that fractal compression of parrot picture.
He didn't really die, you know (Score:5, Insightful)
if you look closer, you'll realize that he didn't die, it's just he became too big for us to see.
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1: No, look he's over there.
2: Where?
1: Between this and that.
2: OK, between this and that. There's a thing between this and that.
1: Yes, look between this and that other thing.
2: OK, there's something there is that him?
1: No, look between this and that. Keep looking...
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>begs the question
You know, I have given up on this one. Not only is it too late to save it, it is a horrible translation in the first place. Nowadays I prefer to use the Latin: petitio principii. After all we Latin for other logical fallacies, like ad hominem and non sequitur
As for "whom" I don't care one way or the other. "intensive purposes" is just horrible, though. It sounds like nails on a chalkboard.
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well, look at the rest of that comment. Did it make any sense at all from top to bottom?
Thus, of-course, it's "intensive purposes" and "begs question", where there was no begging of any question obviously.
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Oh, I understood what he was doing.
Mandelbrot plot (Score:5, Funny)
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Ooooh, so does plot Mandelbrot in Soviet Russia?
damn you rss! (Score:5, Funny)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/10/16/1446231/Benoit-Mandelbrot-Dies-At-85?from=rss
rss takes another victim...
An Inspiration (Score:4, Insightful)
I think those pictures he came up with first inspired an entire generation of would-be computer scientists, maths geeks, physicists and Scientific American readers. How such a simple iteration could render those fascinating patterns even on a 2d grid, remains to this day one of the big mysteries. R.I.P. Benoit, I hope you'll finally be able to make sense of the fractal nature of things from up / down there!
I'll miss the guy (Score:5, Interesting)
I met the guy personally at least 4 times in the last 5 years. He was great to get along with and not aloof at all for all his successes.
I'm currently following up on is work in finance (stable distributions).
May he RIP, and may his family consider him resting.
Fractals.. a gateway drug to more complex models (Score:5, Interesting)
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I heard Mandelbrot talk at IBM a few years ago. He was concerned about the increase in volatility of the financial markets - this was before 2008 - and I wonder what his last thoughts were on the subject of economics.
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Mandelbrot Set (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're a Rorshach test on fire. You're a day-glo pterodactyl. You're a heart-shaped box of strings and wire and one bad-ass f*ing fractal.
Was there ever a real-time viewer... (Score:2)
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He asked for "real time".
I would suspect the switch from hardware doubles to software arbitrary-precision produces many orders of magnitude of slowdown so the answer is no.
Math and youth (Score:5, Interesting)
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Defying the notion that mathematicians are over the hill at age 30,
Wait 'till you hit 31, that's when mathematicians are in their prime.
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Fractint Rocks (Score:2)
I spent many hours exploring fractals with that software. Though I had a little better graphics (EGA). Fond memories.
A great mathematician is no more... (Score:3, Insightful)
I, too, used Fract386, which became Fractint....I worked at a computer store in Toronto, and we used to sell so many NEC Multi-Sync monitors with ATI's VGA Wonder card based upon showing Fractint on it!
Through someone on I met on LJ, I was able to get a "autographed mandelbrot", basically a color print out of part of the Mandelbrot set, autographed by the now, late, great Benoit Mandelbrot. Although I never got to meet him, he discovery has given much beauty to my life.
ttyl
Farrell
Thank you Mandelbrot! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fractals were how this non-artist got his art credit in high school with style. :)
This is a good chance to remind y'all (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of the people who have discovered things great and small that astonish and delight are still living. It's not too late to look them up on the internet and personally thank them.
So much to say (Score:2)
Seen it all (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but when you've seen one part of the Mandelbrot set, you've seen it all.
Rest in peace (Score:2)
Check out 3D fractals (Score:2, Interesting)
My first program... (Score:3, Interesting)
... back in uni - gwbasic I think - was a Mandelbrot set renderer. We were just starting with Mathematical Analysis and the first real struggles with imaginary numbers, sequences, series and limits. I guess messing around with it cost me an exam session, but it was way much more fun than rote theorems (later Profs were good, not that first class though ;( )
RIP
CG procedurals (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago it was popular to make CG images of starships with a procedural/fractal nebula in the background. I used to make comments like: "The Enterprise is investigating the Mandelbrot Nebula", but nobody I know of ever got it.
Inspiring life (Score:2)
A truly great man. The world is a little poorer.. (Score:2, Interesting)
His good counsel... (Score:4, Interesting)
To Mandelbrot, and Beyond the Infinite. (Score:2)
And in case you haven't noticed, the title here is a paraphrase of a title of a chapter of a story (or film) of another Great that, too, is no longer with us. Let's see if you recognize it.
It is sad that brilliant minds die. But it happens. And may you fall into an infinite trench of Fractal wonders.
Mandelbrot has inspired many, and has inspired me to create Gravity Set Fractals.
http:// [fredmitchell.net]
My humble contribution (Score:2)
A manderbrot set renderer I happened to write a few years ago in dc(1) [wikipedia.org]:
[lolssdsl0lqx]sx[1+lddd*lld*-ls+dsdrll2**lo+dsld*rd*+4<kd15>q]sq[q
]9ksk[d77/3*2-ss47lxx-P1+d78>0]s00[d23/.5-3*so0l0xr10P1+d24>u]dsux
The output of the program [kiviniemi.name] in case you don't feel like running it yourself.
R.I.P (Score:2)
Write your own (Score:2)
I don't think you can fully appreciate the deep beauty of the Mandelbrot set until you've coded your own program to render it. Sure, once you've done it, use someone else's implementation -- it's sure to be faster, more flexible and have a nicer UI. But writing your own makes you understand the underlying maths.
I wrote mine in Basic on a BBC Micro. I'd leave it overnight to render a full screen 320x256, 4bpp.
Now it's a piece of cake in Processing or Processing.js, and renders pretty much instantly:
http://pr [processingjs.org]
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...
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.....
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Quite - slashdot's obit for a mathematician: read about one thing he did in a popular mass-distributed sci fi book, ran a bit of software (ON A FLOPPY DISK AND ON A FOUR COLOUR DISPLAY!)
Re:Fractint? Pah? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to post much the same thing. Some nerd eulogy, 10 words pertaining to the death of a math hero, ~70 devoted to the author. Can we get more HF Asperger/Narcissistic.
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I was going to post much the same thing. Some nerd eulogy, 10 words pertaining to the death of a math hero, ~70 devoted to the author. Can we get more HF Asperger/Narcissistic.
Yes. How awful that the author would talk about how the deceased affected him personally.
If ever affected as many people as Mandlebrot did, I would be insulted if they talked about it at my funeral.
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Personally I think it was nice, giving us a perspective how the deceased affected the writer's life, and probably others' as well.
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Heh, well, I suppose I could have written more, but I thought linking to his Wikipedia page should be sufficient. Although reading it again, I should have at least mentioned that he coined the word "fractal", in case there's a /. reader out there who does not know of Mandelbrot.
And it was a 5.25" floppy disk, although I copied it to my 20 MB HD.
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Yes, Fractint. It was my introduction to truly Free Software. Because the group that released it called themselves Stone Soup Software, and I knew the story of Stone Soup, I immediately understood what Free Software was all about.
I always remember this little snippet from one of the many text files that accompanied the archive:
Don't want money, got money. Want admiration.
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Real men did it with checkerboards. In the 80's i had an ST, so i was not trapped in 8-bit color land. But the overnight thing, i totally agree.