Charleston County Public Library

The fractalist, memoir of a scientific maverick, Benoit B. Mandelbrot

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The fractalist

303042882

Benoit B. Mandelbrot

memoir of a scientific maverick

"A ... memoir from the man who revitalized visual geometry, and whose ideas about fractals have changed how we look at both the natural world and the financial world"--Front flap of jacket

Acknowledgments / by Aliette Mandelbrot -- Beauty and roughness: introduction -- pt. 1: How I came to be a scientist. Roots: of flesh and the mind -- Child in Warsaw, 1924-36 -- Adolescent in Paris, 1936-39 -- Dirt-poor hills of unoccupied Vichy France, 1939-43 -- On to Lyon: tighter occupation and self-discovery, 1943-44 -- Horse groom near Pommiers-en-Forez, 1944 -- Alleluiah! the war moves away and a new life beckons -- pt. 2: My long and meandering education in science and in life. Paris: exam hell, agony of choice, and one day at the École Normale Supérieure, 1944-45 -- A (then rare) foreign student at the École Polytechnique, 1945-47 -- Pasadena: student at Caltech during a golden age, 1947-49 -- French Air Force Engineers reserve officer in training, 1949-50 -- Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera -- Life as a grad student and Philips Electronics employee, 1950-52 -- First Kepler moment: the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution of word frequencies, 1951 -- Postdoctoral grand tour begins at MIT, 1953 -- Princeton: John von Neumann's last postdoc, 1953-54 -- Paris, 1954-55 -- Wooing and marrying Aliette, 1955 -- In Geneva with Jean Piaget, Mark Kak, and Willy Feller, 1955-57 -- An underachieving and restless maverick pulls up shallow roots, 1957-58 -- pt. 3: My life's fruitful third stage. At IBM Research through its golden age in the sciences, 1958-93 -- At Harvard: firebrand newcomer to finance advances a revolutionary development, 1962-63 -- On to fractals: through IBM, Harvard, MIT, and Yale via economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics, 1963-64 -- Based at IBM, moving from place to place and field to field, 1964-79 -- Annus mirabilis at Harvard: the Mandelbrot set and other forays into pure mathematics, 1979-80 -- A word and a book: "fractal" and The fractal geometry of nature -- At Yale: rising to the university's highest rank, Sterling Professorship, 1987-2004 -- Has my work founded the first-ever broad theory of roughness? -- Beauty and roughness: full circle -- Afterword / by Michael Frame