Making Sense of Chaos

By the time of his death, Benoit Mandelbrot, once considered a maverick, had significantly changed the way we look at our world

Very few men can claim to have coined a word that enters ordinary vocabulary so fast and so easily that we would not know how to describe our world without it now. It was only in 1975 that Benoit Mandelbrot used the term ‘fractal’ to describe self similar structure where a part seems to resemble the whole.

To cite the best known such example, a map of the coastline magnified to any degree seems to replicate the original features of the coastline with its jagged indentations, gulfs and islands. Such structures seem to occur with great frequency in our world and the study of their ‘roughness’ has led to many different discoveries in science.

In an interview to NOVA, Mandelbrot describes how very early in his career he “came to devote my life to phenomena that may belong to very different organised sciences but have the common characteristic of being irregular and fragmented at many scales. Like the weather, for instance’’. As he continued to study such phenomena, he came to realise that they could be subsumed under the title fractals, and indeed his work has led to a certain common understanding of disparate phenomena ranging across fields of human and scientific activity—the clustering of galaxies, the branching of trees, or for that matter the ECG of heartbeats.

Mandelbrot combined his fundamental insight with a mind that spanned different areas of science, always asking pertinent questions. He was always more interested in the provocative hypothesis, the correct surmise, rather than in specialised work within a particular area. Which is why he could say, “I don’t sound like a mathematician. I don’t sound like a physicist either. Nor do I sound like an art critic. There’s very great strength in being a stranger, if one brings something new.’’ By the time he died on 14 October, he had done just this many times over.

Benoit Mandelbrotchaosfractal