Benoit Mandelbrot: Google celebrates the 96th birthday of American-French-Polish mathematician known as the ‘father of fractal geometry’ with animated Doodle

Google animated Doodle celebrates the 96th birthday of American-French-Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, commonly known as the “father of fractal geometry”, on November 20, 2020.

Who was Benoit Mandelbrot?

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was born on 20 November 1924 in a Jewish family, in Warsaw, Poland, during the Second Polish Republic. He was a Polish-born French and American mathematician and polymath with wide interests in the practical sciences, particularly seeing what he marked as “the art of roughness” of physical phenomena and “the uncontrolled element in life”.

Benoit Mandelbrot referred to himself as a “fractalist” and is perceived for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included instituting “fractal”, as well as building up a theory of “roughness and self-similarity” in nature.

During his first two school years, Benoit Mandelbrot was tutored privately by an uncle who loathed rote learning. Afterward, the family’s transition to France, the war, and his colleague with his dad’s sibling, the mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt who had moved to Paris around 1920, further restricted a standard education.

In 1936, while Benoit Mandelbrot was 11, Mandelbrot’s family emigrated to France from Warsaw, Poland. Mandelbrot went to the Lycée Rolin in Paris until the beginning of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, France.

Benoit Mandelbrot was helped by Rabbi David Feuerwerker, the Rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, to proceed with his studies. Quite a bit of France was involved by the Nazis at that time, and Mandelbrot reviews this period.

After World War II finished, Benoit Mandelbrot got back to Paris in 1944, learned at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, and in 1945 to 1947 went to the École Polytechnique, where he studied under Gaston Julia and Paul Lévy.

From 1947 to 1949, he learned at the California Institute of Technology, where he acquired a master’s degree in aeronautics. Getting back to France, he acquired his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Paris in 1952.

From 1949 to 1958, Benoit Mandelbrot was a staff member at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique. During this time he went through a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was sponsored by John von Neumann.

In 1955, Benoit Mandelbrot wedded Aliette Kagan and moved to Geneva, Switzerland (to team up with Jean Piaget at the International Center for Genetic Epistemology) and later to the Université Lille Nord de France.

From 1951 onward, Benoit Mandelbrot took a shot at issues and published papers in mathematics as well as in applied fields, for example, information theory, economics, and fluid dynamics.

Benoit Mandelbrot spent the vast majority of his career in both the United States and France, having double French and American citizenship. In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Benoit Mandelbrot started a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of nonattendance to teach at Harvard University.

Benoit Mandelbrot stayed at IBM for 35 years, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets comparable to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.

As a result of his access to IBM’s computers, Benoit Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to make and show fractal geometric pictures, prompting his disclosure of the Mandelbrot set in 1980. He demonstrated how visual complexity can be made from straightforward standards. He expressed that things commonly viewed as “rough”, a “mess” or “chaotic”, like mists or shorelines, really had a “degree of order”.

Benoit Mandelbrot’s math and geometry focused research career included commitments to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, IT, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy, and the social sciences.

At the finish of his career, Benoit Mandelbrot was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale’s history to get residency. Mandelbrot likewise held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Université Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study, and Center National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Benoit Mandelbrot has been called an artist, and a visionary, and a maverick. His casual and enthusiastic way of composing and his emphasis on visual and geometric instinct (upheld by the incorporation of various illustrations) made The Fractal Geometry of Nature available to non-specialists.

In 1982, Benoit Mandelbrot extended and updated his thoughts in The Fractal Geometry of Nature. The book started a far-reaching famous interest in fractals and added to chaos theory and different fields of science and mathematics.

Benoit Mandelbrot additionally set his plans to work in cosmology. He offered in 1974 another clarification of Olbers’ paradox (the “dark night sky” riddle), exhibiting the outcomes of fractal theory as an adequate, however redundant, resolution of the paradox.

Benoit Mandelbrot proposed that if the stars in the universe were fractally circulated (for instance, similar to Cantor dust), it would not be important to depend on the Big Bang theory to clarify the paradox. His model would not preclude a Big Bang, yet would take into account a dark sky regardless of whether the Big Bang had not happened.

During his career, Benoit Mandelbrot got more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on numerous science journals, alongside winning various awards. Mandelbrot’s awards incorporate the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993, the Lewis Fry Richardson Prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, the Japan Prize in 2003, and the Einstein Lectureship of the American Mathematical Society in 2006.

The small asteroid 27500 Mandelbrot was named in his honor. In November 1990, he was made a Chevalier in France’s Legion of Honor. In December 2005, Mandelbrot was selected for the position of Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Benoit Mandelbrot was elevated to an Officer of the Legion of Honor in January 2006. An honorary degree from Johns Hopkins University was presented on Mandelbrot in the May 2010 beginning exercises.

Mandelbrot died from pancreatic cancer at 85 years old in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 14 October 2010.

Benoit Mandelbrot’s eulogy in The Economist calls attention to his distinction as a “celebrity beyond the academy” and praises him as the “father of fractal geometry”. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, was published posthumously in 2012.

Google Doodle on Benoit Mandelbrot’s 96th Birthday

On November 20, 2020, Google observes Benoit Mandelbrot’s 96th Birthday with an animated Doodle.

Benoit Mandelbrot’s pioneering research made important contributions to a wide array of fields, including physics, finance, medicine, geology, and even art, among different fields. To respect his contribution to helping us comprehend our general surroundings, Google indicated its Doodle on Friday to Benoit Mandelbrot on his 96th birthday.

The present Google Doodle shows Benoit Mandelbrot standing before a chalkboard, amidst a lesson about fractals. On the left half of the board, the first “O” of “Google” has been supplanted with a Koch snowflake, one of the early fractals — found before the word was instituted — which was simple for mathematicians and educators to draw without the guide of a computer.

Google Doodle is that the artist has left Benoit Mandelbrot’s necktie transparent, letting an animation of the Mandelbrot set on the right half of the chalkboard radiate through.

Also going with the Doodle, Google Search has incorporated an interactive fractal watcher, where you can zoom in and out of a Benoit Mandelbrot set delineation, or essentially press play and be astounded at what a basic set of mathematical principles can become.