The Father of Computer generated Fractals passes Away

On 14 October 2010, the genius who coined the word - Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot - died, aged 85, from cancer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11564766

begin quote from above news site:

Mandelbrot famously wrote: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

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What are fractals?

• Geometrical objects that are self-similar when the distance at which they are viewed is changed
• Concept is helpful in allowing order to be perceived in apparent disorder
• Eg, in the case of a river and its tributaries, every tributary has its own tributaries…
• ...so that it has the same structure organisation as the entire river except that it covers a smaller area

Source: McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology

The chaos and irregularity of the world - Mandelbrot referred to it as "roughness" - is something to be celebrated. It would be a shame if clouds really were spheres, and mountains cones.

Look closely at a fractal, and you will find that the complexity is still present at a smaller scale. A small cloud is strikingly similar to the whole thing. A pine tree is composed of branches that are composed of branches - which in turn are composed of branches.
A tiny sand dune or a puddle in a mountain track have the same shapes as a huge sand dune and a lake in a mountain gully. This "self-similarity" at different scales is a defining characteristic of fractals.

 

The fractal mathematics Mandelbrot pioneered, together with the related field of chaos theory, lifts the veil on the hidden beauty of the world. It inspired scientists in many disciplines - including cosmology, medicine, engineering and genetics - and artists and musicians, too.

The whole universe is fractal, and so there is something joyfully quintessential about Mandelbrot's insights. end quote.


In the mid 1980s when I bought my first IBM Clone PC AT 286 with 20 megabytes of memory( a lot for a PC then) one of the things I would use my math co-processor for would be to run the computer about 24 hours so I could print out one of the amazing math formula generated fractals. A natural fractal is any landscape you see on earth or any planet or sun or asteroid belt and in all the computer generated backgrounds we take for granted now are the mathematically formulated landscapes of fractals that allow the natural looking backgrounds in computer games everywhere.

So, with the passing of Mandelbrot, the mathematical genius who invented computer generated fractals it takes us back to how some of the elements of the computer generation of graphics got its start through algorithms and formulas.