Benoit Mandelbrot 96th birthday谷歌标志标志

Benoit Mandelbrot 96th birthday谷歌标志
20 November 2020

Today’s Doodle celebrates the 96th birthday of Polish-born, French and American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, widely known as the “father of fractal geometry.” Mandelbrot’s pioneering research was instrumental in introducing the world to the powerful concept of fractals–irregular yet infinitely repeating mathematical shapes found throughout nature and our everyday lives.

Mandelbrot was born on this day in 1924 in Warsaw, Poland to parents of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage. From being a local chess champion to a student of his father’s map collection, at a young age Mandelbrot was exposed to mathematics and geometry in everyday life. In 1936 the family emigrated to France, and Mandelbrot went on to pursue his education in both Paris and the United States, culminating in a doctorate in 1952.

In 1958 Mandelbrot began working at the Watson Research Center at IBM in New York, where his study of peculiar repetitions in signal noise formed an early inspiration for his groundbreaking work. An early pioneer of the use of computers for research, he later used a basic computerized typewriter to develop an algorithm that modeled landforms found in nature. In 1975, he coined the now-famous term “fractal geometry” to describe these mathematical phenomena; with the release of his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature” in 1982, Mandelbrot’s work reached the world, forever altering the field of applied mathematics.

Mandelbrot went on to receive countless awards for his work, including the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in 1993.

Happy birthday to Benoit Mandelbrot, a man whose curiosity helped to expand the way we see the world around us.