Talk:Benoit Mandelbrot

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comments

Now I love etymology more than most folks, but this clever concatenation of factoids doesn't come up again in the entry, so I'm moving 'em:

In German, Mandelbrot means "almond bread", while Benoît is French for "Benedict" meaning "blessed".

--MichaelTinkler

Aslo in swedish SV:Mandelbrotmängden

I also have a question, is in not better to redirect Benoît Mandelbrot to Benoît B. Mandelbrot (the correct name) and not the way it is today? Is there a reason for not doing this?? // Solkoll 20:23, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

How is that the correct name? Gzornenplatz 20:26, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

The correct name coz it's spelled correctly :-) Paul.N.Lee has got a page here, where he lists all names in the fractal world (also mine ;-) and I normaly use this list when nameing the persons I write about. Like a standards list. // Solkoll 21:10, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

"Benoît Mandelbrot" is also spelled correctly. The initial is not an essential part of the name - with Google I get 15,700 hits without, and only 4,970 with. And I can't find a single incidence where the middle name is spelled out - what the B. stands for is a mystery. Gzornenplatz 22:10, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

Ok! google figures rules :-) About the "B"??? I have no idéa! intresting i say, // Solkoll 23:40, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Benoît Mandelbrot is French, and in France, in general, people do not use a middle initial. He's always referred to in France as Benoît Mandelbrot, not Benoît B. Mandelbrot. There might be a case for adding the B. if it were the common usage in English, but that's not even the case. David.Monniaux 06:27, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Google sucks ;-P

—DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 04:13, 22 September 2008 (UTC))[reply]

picture?

Shouldn't there be a picture of him insted a Mandelbrot Set in the opening? Just to comply with the Biography Standard.... (Looking for some picture of him). nihil 20:21, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Fatou/Mandelbrot

The Mandelbrot set article states that "The Mandelbrot set was first defined in 1905 by Pierre Fatou", yet this biography says "lthough Mandelbrot invented the word fractal, many of the objects featured in The Fractal Geometry of Nature had been previously described by other mathematicians (the Mandelbrot set being a notable exception)." Am I reading it wrong, or is there a disagreement here like I think?

Fatou investigated the mathematics behind the Mandelbrot set; Mandelbrot was the first to visualise it (and probably the first mathematician to appreciate how complex an object it really is). As it goes on to say further on in the Mandelbrot set article:

Fatou never saw the image of what we now call the Mandelbrot set as we do because the number of calculations required to generate this is far more than could be calculated by hand. Professor Benoît Mandelbrot was the first person to use a computer to plot the set.

Gandalf61 09:55, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, Fatou never studied the Mandelbrot set, or parameter spaces of this kind. However, Brooks and Matelski actually studied the Mandelbrot set before Mandelbrot, in a study of Kleinian Groups, and produced some pictures. (Well, more precisely they studied the set of hyperbolic components, which is conjectured to be equal to the interior of the Mandelbrot set.) Also, I don't really think it is correct to say that Mandelbrot 'built' on the work of Fatou and Julia --- my impression is that he was not actually very familiar with their theory, at least at the time. --LR 22:53, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Mandelbrot was very familiar with Julia and Fatou's work. He was a student of Julia at the École Polytechnique. In Mandelbrot's own words:

This theory (interation of rational maps of the complex plane) was dormant in 1979 having reached its high point long before, around 1918, with famous papers by G.Julia and P.Fatou ... I had read or scanned them at the age of twenty ... and they had been incredibly influential in my life.

from Fractals and the Rebirth of Iteration Theory, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, published in The Beauty of Fractals, H.-O.Peitgen & P.H. Richter, 1986. Gandalf61 08:40, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some of Mandelbrot's claims in his first article on the Mandelbrot set are easily seen to be false using the results of Fatou and Julia. For example, I seem to recall that Mandelbrot believed that every parameter in the Mandelbrot set has a filled Julia set with nonempty interior. --LR 18:44, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The change in the formula

As the main article mentions in passing, the original formula presented by BBM was z -> z² - c but it was later changed to z -> z² + c. However, it doesn't say when or why this happened. Does anybody know? Khim1 13:24, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See response on Talk:Mandelbrot set page Gandalf61 11:56, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation

1. Since this guy still seems to be alive, what about asking himself how he wants his name to be pronounced? 2. Since it is a Yiddish/German word, what about pronouncing it like that or at least mention how it'd be pronounced in Yiddish/German? (the closest would probably be the pronouncation given by Merriam-Webster)

The first of those points is exactly what I was going to ask! (Actually, if any wikipedian would ask him that question, I suppose it would constitute original research, so the better thing to do would be to find a recording of how he pronounces it, or to find an article about him where this is mentioned.) --Keeves 20:30, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Or one could just ask someone who knows him.

I saw Benoît Mandelbrot today. The way he says his own name in French sounds like a French person would pronounce Mandelbraut, with a 't' at the end. I don't know IPA though. David.Monniaux 21:21, 11 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Tages on new section

The new section headed Controversy, added by an anon, contains a number of unsourced and potentially controversial/POV statements. I have tagged them with {{fact}} - unless someone can add references in the next few days, I will be tempted to significantly trim this section or remove it completely. Gandalf61 11:31, 25 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

מתמטיקאי יהודי

I have changed the introduction to conform to the Hebrew language article.--Lance ^talk 14:04, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bibliography and nobel price.

Could we get a list of his books and major articles. Richard Olsen once attempted to campaign for him to be awarded a nobel price in economics. http://www.olsen.ch/research/workingpapers/emperor050110.pdf. . Kendirangu 07:14, 30 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

German on average?

I was at a public lecture by M. at the Australian National University twenty years ago. The host introduced him by saying that he had been born in Poland, and raised in France, and so was "on average German". M opened by saying that the host had stolen his joke.

If indeed M. has/does use this line, I think that it would be worth a mention in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.243.60.12 (talk) 23:55, 11 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Citizenship

When I was a student, around 1996, I attended a talk by Benoît Mandelbrot. At some point he deplored that some described him as American whereas he is French. Maybe he has dual citizenship, but certainly claiming he is "French-American" would need solid backing. David.Monniaux (talk) 19:07, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fact-checked. Benoît Mandelbrot has dual citizenship. (He deplored being described solely as American.) David.Monniaux (talk) 17:36, 16 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]