RIP Benoit Mandelbrot

Once in a while comes a man whose thought and intellect change
completely the way we look at the world. Newton, Leibniz were like
that. Mandelbrot belongs also in that category.

Known as the Father of Fractals he literally changed the way we look
at the world by noting that Euclidian geometry, with its points, lines
and circles, was a too perfect description of the real world which is
ROUGH. Draw a line and if you magnify it enough you will see that what
you drew had all kinds of ridges and valleys, nothing like the
abstract thing that existed in your mind. To describe that rough
reality, Mandelbrot introduced the concept of the fractal and fractal
geometry. A fractal is a new dimension between 2 and 3 dimensions,
something that when magnified still looks like itself.

It turned out that fractal geometry was a very good model for many
natural phenomena. It also turned out that the development of fractal
geometry, which started in the 70's, coincided with the development of
personal computing, which provided the means to graphically represent
fractals. And lo and behold, fractals were beautiful, some of the most
breathtaking mathematical objects.

For introducing amazing beauty into mathematics as well as extreme
usefulness, the Father of Fractals deserves to be called a genius, a
towering mind who set humanity on a brand new intellectual course.