To listen to more of Benoît Mandelbrot’s stories, go to the playlist: • Benoît Mandelbrot - Fa...
The late French-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010) discovered his ability to think about mathematics in images while working with the French Resistance, and is famous for his work on fractal geometry, the maths of the shapes found in nature. [Listeners: Bernard Sapoval and Daniel Zajdenweber; date recorded: 1998].
TRANSCRIPT: But of course in 1950, which is the period I'm talking about, it was a very long time before my finding out in '72 that I might not have been alone. As a matter of fact, a little bit later, when I was no longer at Philips, I wrote a little paper on scaling which I'd forgotten about until I stumbled across it a few months ago, in which I made a statement that those techniques make you think inevitably of critical phenomena. I was thinking of critical opalescence, which was something I'd read about, I was fascinated, but I said, "In physics nothing can diverge, whereas I need divergences." Of course, the physicists had to accept divergences also, but I didn't know it.
6 окт 2024
