The Fractalist

May 21, 2012
Mandelbrot changed the way we look at a wide range of random phenomena from commodity prices to the shapes of mountains, rivers, and coastlines. An “outlier” long before the word became popular, he was born in 1924 to Jewish parents and grew up in Warsaw, Poland, and then Paris, with “a high level of self-confidence” that grounded him throughout his peripatetic life during and after the chaos of WWII. After the war he pursued his scientific dreams at the École Polytechnique in Paris, later at MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere. But the work that led to his great innovation began with his 1958 arrival at the intellectually expansive IBM facility in Yorktown, N.Y. Over the next couple of decades, Mandelbrot discovered patterns in a wide range of phenomena such as price variation and the distribution of galaxies and irregularly shaped objects like clouds that could not be mathematically described. He called his mathematical innovation “fractal geometry.” The memoir captures the enthusiasm as well as the memories of a visionary who loved nothing better than studying complex multidisciplinary concepts. (Mandelbrot died in 2010, after completing this book.) Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc.

September 1, 2012
Memoir of a brilliant mathematician who never thought of himself as a mathematician. Part of the reason is that Mandelbrot's work had wide-ranging impact; as his best-known book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) illustrates, his insights apply across many disciplines. That breadth of interest originated in Mandelbrot's early years, growing up in a Jewish family that managed to dodge the currents of anti-Semitism, moving from Lithuania to Poland to France, where the author spent the World War II years in a provincial town, away from the attention of the occupiers. Early in life, he learned about Johannes Kepler, whose geometric insights changed the nature of astronomy, and Mandelbrot made it one of his goals to achieve a similar breakthrough. After the war, his academic skills got him into the ecole Polytechnique, an elite training school for military engineers. Then he bounced around from Caltech to the French air force to the University of Paris to the Institute for Advanced Studies. Along the way, he made the acquaintance of an impressive number of scientific giants, acquired a doctorate and a love of music and married Aliette Kagan, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. To this point, his career showed more promise than achievement. Taking a job with IBM, which encouraged basic research with no obvious application to its products, turned out to be his best move. There, he found his interest in "roughness" led to geometric insights that opened doors in a number of fields. The final pages are a summary of accomplishments, publications and recognitions. Interestingly, the narrative deliberately avoids mathematics and therefore gives only the vaguest suggestion of his actual work. That decision undoubtedly makes the book more accessible to general readers, but it also throws the emphasis on the more superficial aspects of his career. Nonetheless, the portraits of his contemporaries and their milieu are worth the read. Charmingly written, but readers interested in the nature of the work that won him his accolades will have to look elsewhere.

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August 1, 2012

Mathematician Mandelbrot (Fractals and Chaos: The Mandelbrot Set and Beyond) died in 2010, but not before writing down the story of his life and work. This memoir describes a scientific career marked by unconventional choices and an intuition for overlooked areas of inquiry. His rapidly changing interests brought the mathematician into collaboration with everyone from John von Neumann, an early father of the field of computing, to famed educational psychologist Jean Piaget. These disparate intellectual experiences ultimately come together in Mandelbrot's signal contribution: defining those odd iterative shapes called fractals (the iconic Mandelbrot set being just one example) and using them as models for real-world phenomena like the shapes of mountains and nautilus shells. Though sometimes it struggles under the weight of too much detail, the book is worth reading to learn more about Mandelbrot's unique contributions to the field of mathematics. VERDICT An engaging, nontechnical read for general audiences interested in modern mathematics.--J.J.S. Boyce, formerly with Louis Riel and Pembina Trails Sch. Divisions, Winnipeg

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