Shared by JohnH

NNT’s tribute to Benoit Mandelbrot. Unforunately, the rest of it is behind a pay wall for now.

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones … and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line,” wrote Benoît Mandelbrot, contradicting more than 2,000 years of misconceptions. Triangles, squares and circles seem to exist in our textbooks more than they do in reality–and before Mandelbrot, we hadn’t noticed that. Thus was born fractal geometry, the science of “roughness.” Simple rules used by nature (and men), thanks to repetition, generate the seemingly complex and chaotic patterns we call fractals. There, just as branches look like small trees, the small parts resemble the whole.

Self-taught and fiercely independent,…