Benoît Mandelbrot, Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

[polaris93]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=1

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(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIlwFpz9s_I)

Ave atque vale, Bennie, we hardly knew ye. You will be missed

Comments

[brezhnev]

I remember writing code to generate the Mandelbrot set (and smaller pieces of it). First I did it on an Apple //e, later on a 286 (which was much faster). And these folks have done this and a lot more:
http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractint.html

[polaris93]

Wow!

What impresses me about the Mandelbrot set is that nobody really realized what it would look like, or the sort of things you could do with it as far as coloring it goes, until we had computers that could calculate it and present it as a graphic display. That whole revolution in generating realistic-looking images and great art using fractals also happened due to the computer revolution. You can't create such things from scratch using the sort of media artists have always used, e.g., paint, canvas, etc. -- you need a computer from that.

Ever since I first learned about the Mandelbrot set, I've been wondering what else is out there we don't know about yet, waiting to be discovered by somebody using a computer.

[brezhnev]

Indeed. On my earliest attempts (and those of my pal using a VAX) we had it printed out on dot matrix paper. I tried coloring a big one, but it was too big :)

[polaris93]

No, drawing and coloring it by hand would be a bitch. How much definition was the dot matrix printer capable of?