Benoit Mandelbrot’s 96th birthday, Google doodle on father of fractal geometry

Happy Birthday Benoit Mandelbrot!!!

Today Google celebrates the 96^th birthday of the great mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot with a beautiful doodle. He is widely known as the ‘father of fractal geometry’.

Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French and American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences. He was born on November 20, 1924 in a Jewish family, in Warsaw during the Second Polish Republic. His father made his living trading clothing; his mother was a dental surgeon.

When Benoit Mandelbrot was 11 years old, his family emigrated from Poland to France. "The fact that my parents, as economic and political refugees, joined Szolem in France saved our lives," he wrote later. He attended the Lycée Rolin in Paris until the start of World War II, when his family moved to Tulle, France.

The Rabbi David Feuerwerker (who is remembered for his effectiveness in the resistance to German occupation the Second World War) helped Benoit Mandelbrot to continue his studies.

Benoit Mandelbrot returned to Paris in 1944 and studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon. He attended École Polytechnique where he studied under Gaston Julia and Paul Lévy. He also studied at California Institute of Technology between 1947 and 1949. He earned a master’s degree in aeronautics from California Institute of Technology. Then he returned to France and obtained his PhD degree in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Paris in 1952.

In 1958, Benoit Mandelbrot began working at the Watson Research Center at IBM in New York, where his study of peculiar repetitions in signal noise formed an early inspiration for his groundbreaking work. In 1975, he coined the now-famous term ‘fractal geometry’ to describe these mathematical phenomena; with the release of his book ‘The Fractal Geometry of Nature’ in 1982, Mandelbrot’s work reached the world, forever altering the field of applied mathematics.

Benoit Mandelbrot saw financial markets as an example of ‘wild randomness’, characterized by concentration and long range dependence. He developed several original approaches for modelling 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.

Benoit Mandelbrot received several awards and accolades for his work, including the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in 1993. Some of his awards are 2004 Best Business Book of the Year Award, Fellow of the American Physical Society (1987), Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow, American Geophysical Union, Harvey Prize (1989), Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics (1993), Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, John Scott Award, Casimir Funk Natural Sciences Award to name a few.

Benoit Mandelbrot died on October 14, 2010 at the age of 85. Today on November 20, Google celebrates Benoit Mandelbrot’s 96^th birthday with a lovely doodle.

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