Mandelbrot in Paris
Last week Benoit B Mandelbrot came to Télécom Paris, and I didn’t understand a word he said.
When I saw a poster about fractals, I firstly dismissed it as a relatively tiresome physics lecture. However, when I learnt that Mandelbrot was going to be giving the lecture, I knew I had to go. After all, one of the most famous fractals of all (shown in the pretty picture) was named after him.
The 80-year old man did a relatively good job of keeping his audience interested, from behind a desk at the front of the packed theatre. His projector slides were curiously English, but then he has lectured all over the world in his career, and he gave the impression that this was a frequently recycled, translated presentation.
He spoke about how fractals posess a large amount of, perhaps infinite, detail. They are doubly cool becuase they are self-similar - so if you keep zooming in the picture, you see the same patterns again and again. He told us all about how these things occur in nature, like mountain ranges.
The thing is, this is what I assume he was talking about. In reality, I memorised a few key words and pictures, and found out all about them later. But if anyone asks, I can say I learnt it all from Mandelbrot himself. This is our little secret.
