Benoit Mandelbrot
Yale University
November 20, 1924 - October 14, 2010
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Scientific Discipline: Applied Physical Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1987)
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From very early in his career, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot wanted to start his own Keplerian revolution by describing a new way of looking at the world. Now often called the father of fractal geometry, he succeeded. Fractals have been the subject of dozens of scientific conferences, hundreds of books, thousands of papers, and millions of web pages. And he influenced not just science and finance but also music, art, and literature. Mandelbrot was active in many fields, but he described himself simply as a storyteller. A fractal description of an object, after all, is a story about how it grows. The delicate arms of a snowflake are a story of the temperature, pressure, and humidity the snowflake encountered on its dance through the cloud. A coastline is a story of rocks, waves, and tides. Fractals remind us that science has a narrative component—and that its stories are critical to our lives.
Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw, Poland, but in 1936, when he was 12 years old, he and his family moved—indeed, fled—to France in order to avoid the troubles developing in Eastern Europe that culminated in World War II. Those troubles soon caught up with them, but they all survived. In 1944, Mandelbrot was admitted to the École Polytechnique; he also spent time at Caltech, beginning in 1947, to study aerodynamics; and in 1952 he earned his Ph.D. in mathematical sciences from the University of Paris.
After receiving his doctorate, Mandelbrot worked at Philips Electronics, where he applied spectral analysis techniques learned from turbulence studies at Caltech to the development of color television. In 1953 he took a postdoctoral position at MIT’s Research Laboratory in Electronics and during 1953–54 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study as John von Neumann’s last postdoc. Mandelbrot returned to Paris in 1954 and assumed the rank of junior research professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In 1957 he began teaching as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Lille, but one year later Mandelbrot left France, and full-time academic life, for what he thought would be a brief research appointment at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. This “summer job,” which allowed him to direct his curiosity to a wide range of fields, continued for 35 years.
During that period long period Mandelbrot also spent sabbatical years at Harvard University, in the economics department, applied sciences, and mathematics departments, and in 1980 he taught his first—the first—fractal geometry course, which included the initial images of what came to be known as the Mandelbrot set. In 1987 he began his long association with Yale University, half-time at first because of his continuing ties to IBM, and then, from 1999, as Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Yale’s highest academic rank. In 2004 Mandelbrot became Sterling Professor emeritus.
