Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last week at 85, was to math what Carl Sagan was to astrophysics. He wasn’t just a researcher; he popularized scientific thought. And he’s best known for bringing fractal ...

Researchers have found a fractal pattern underlying everyday math. In the process, they’ve discovered a way to calculate partition numbers, a challenge that’s stymied mathematicians for centuries.

At the start of The Fractalist is a photograph dated June 1930. In a Jewish family's apartment in Warsaw, four Polish mathematicians are hosting a meal for an honoured guest — French mathematician ...

Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematics professor at Yale University who coined the word "fractal," passed away Oct. 14 at the age of 85. His death recalls the complicated history of his life's work -- the ...

Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematics professor at Yale University who coined the word "fractal," passed away Oct. 14 at the age of 85. His death recalls the complicated history of his life's work -- the ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

In 1975, a new word came into use, when a maverick mathematician made an important discovery. So what are fractals? And why are they important? During the 1980s, people became familiar with fractals ...

Fractal geometry is a field of math born in the 1970s and mainly developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. If you’ve already heard of fractals, you’ve probably seen the picture above. It’s called the Mandelbrot ...