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Who Is Beno Mandelbrot

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Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a French and American mathematician-scientist most widely recognized as being the pioneer of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot was born on 20 November 1924 in Warsaw, Poland. Mandelbrot came from a family of Lithuanian Jews where his mother was a dental surgeon and his father was a salesman of clothes. In 1936, at the age of twelve, his family emigrated from Poland and settled in Paris, France. It was in Paris that Mandelbrot would be introduced to mathematics by the Parisian mathematician, and his uncle, Scholem Mandelbrojt. During the German occupation of France during World War II, Mandelbrot and his family fled to the town of Tulle, France to avoid Jewish persecution. Mandelbrot recalls this period of his life as …show more content…

He worked at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for over thirty-five years where he would eventually be awarded the honor of IBM Fellow. (Benoît Mandelbrot, Wikipedia) It was at IBM that Mandelbrot came up with the idea of using the computer technology that was available to graph his mathematical work that he would become famous for. Upon his departure from IBM, he became a professor of mathematics at Yale University. In 1999, at the age of 75, he became the oldest professor to receive tenure at Yale University. (Benoît Mandelbrot, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive) Mandelbrot also received many other honors including an appointment at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where he was appointed as a Battelle Fellow. (Benoît Mandelbrot, Wikipedia) Mandelbrot was heavily criticized early on his career by the mathematical community as being an imbecile for his theories because “Mandelbrot rejected traditional Euclidean geometry for his work with fractals because they could not describe irregularly shaped forms.” (Davis, Profile of Benoît B. Mandelbrot); Mandelbrot was repeatedly told that “you’re wasting your time” (Davis, Profile of Benoît B. Mandelbrot) by his contemporaries. As time passed the criticism eventually ceased and Mandelbrot was honored accordingly. Mandelbrot’s most notable contribution consists of introducing the concept of ‘roughness’ to mathematics through his mathematical work The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which was: “… a revised and enlarged version of his 1977 book entitled Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, which in turn was a revised, enlarged, and translated version of his 1975 French book, Les Objects Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension. The books together comprise one of the ten most influential scientific essays of the 20th century.” (The Fractal Geometry of Nature,

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