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A photo of Benoit Mandelbrot by Rama –

Top 10 Amazing Facts about Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was born on 20 November 1924 and died on 14 October 2010. He was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as “the art of roughness” of physical phenomena and “the uncontrolled element in life”.

He referred to himself as a “fractalist” and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word “fractal”, as well as developing a theory of “roughness and self-similarity” in nature. Let’s proceed to the top ten amazing facts about Benoit Mandelbrot.

1. He studied Mathematics abroad

Benoit Mandelbrot by Steve Jurvetson –

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At the age of 11, Mandelbrot and his family emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, to France in 1936. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Â鶹APP and the United States.

Benoit received a master’s degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship.

2. He started his teaching career at Havard University

Havard University photo by David Adam Kess –

In 1958, Benoit began a 35-year career at IBM. IBM is the abbreviation of International Business Machines Corporation, an American multinational technology corporation. Therefore, Benoit became an IBM Fellow.

Benoit periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets about cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.

3. He is the father of the discovery of the Mandelbrot set

Benoit Mandelbrot photo by Konrad Jacobs –

Working at IBM, Benoit utilized the chance of IMB computers to his advantage. Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1980.

He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be “rough”, a “mess”, or “chaotic”, such as clouds or shorelines, actually had a “degree of order”.

4. During the end of his career he was a sterling professor at Yale University

Yale University photo by Emilie Foyer –

Benoit was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale’s history to receive tenure.

Mandelbrot also held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Université Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study, and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

During his career, he received over 15 honorary doctorates and served in many scientific journals, along with winning numerous awards. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, was published posthumously in 2012.

5. Benoit was born in a working-class family

Benedykt Mandelbrot was born in a Lithuanian Jewish family, in Warsaw during the Second Polish Republic. His father made his living trading clothing; his mother was a dental surgeon. During his first two school years, he was tutored privately by an uncle who despised rote learning.

6. Benoit was a student of Gaston Julia Paul Lévy

Paul Pirre Levy photo by Konrad Jacobs, Erlangen –

Gaston Maurice Julia was a French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set. His works were popularized by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; the Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely related. He founded, independently with Pierre Fatou, the modern theory of holomorphic dynamics.

Paul Pierre Lévy was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions, and characteristic functions.

Lévy processes, Lévy flights, Lévy measures, Lévy’s constant, the Lévy distribution, the Lévy area, the Lévy arcsine law, and the fractal Lévy C curve are named after him.

From 1945 to 1947 Benoit attended the École Polytechnique. This is where he studied under Gaston Julia and Paul Lévy.

7. Benoit started his research career in 1958

From 1949 to 1958, Mandelbrot was a staff member at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During this time he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was sponsored by John von Neumann.

In 1955 he married Aliette Kagan and moved to Geneva, Switzerland (to collaborate with Jean Piaget at the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology) and later to the Université Lille Nord de France.

In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He remained at IBM for 35 years, becoming an IBM Fellow, and later Fellow Emeritus.

8. He developed several original approaches for modeling financial fluctuations

Beoit Mandelbrot photo by Olaf –

Mandelbrot saw financial markets as an example of “wild randomness”, characterized by concentration and long-range dependence. He developed several original approaches for modeling financial fluctuations.

In his early work, he found that the price changes in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution, but rather Lévy stable distributions having infinite variance. He found, for example, that cotton prices followed a Lévy stable distribution with parameter α equal to 1.7 rather than 2 as in a Gaussian distribution.

9. He came up with the Law of Finance

In the late 1980s, Mandelbrot used intra-daily tick data supplied by Olsen & Associates in Zurich to apply fractal theory to market microstructure. This cooperation leads to the publication of the first comprehensive papers on scaling law in finance.

This law shows similar properties at different time scales, confirming Mandelbrot’s insight into the fractal nature of market microstructure. Mandelbrot’s research in this area is presented in his books Fractals and Scaling in Finance and The (Mis)behavior of Markets.

10. Mendel created the theory of roughness

Benoit Mandelbrot photo by Rama –

Mandelbrot created the first-ever “theory of roughness”, and he saw “roughness” in the shapes of mountains, coastlines, and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and, lungs; the clustering of galaxies.

His quest was to create some mathematical formula to measure the overall “roughness” of such objects in nature.  He began by asking himself various kinds of questions related to nature.

In his paper “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension”, published in Science in 1967, Mandelbrot discusses self-similar curves that have Hausdorff dimensions that are examples of fractals.
Although Mandelbrot does not use this term in the paper, as he did not coin it until 1975.

The paper is one of Mandelbrot’s first publications on the topic of fractals. Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models for describing many “rough” phenomena in the real world. He concluded that “real roughness is often fractal and can be measured.