Memorial Hall Library

The fractalist, memoir of a scientific maverick, Benoit Mandelbrot

eng

autobiography

index present

non fiction

The fractalist

303042882

Benoit Mandelbrot

memoir of a scientific maverick

Chance, then free choice, shape a living, fast evolving, and ceaselessly wandering fossil -- Unrelated deeds or a unified fractal approach to roughness? -- Could the Mandelbrot set really be the most complex object in the whole of mathematics? -- Roots, of flesh and the mind -- Child in Warsaw (1924-36) -- Long summer in today's Belarus -- Adolescent in Paris (1936-9) -- Muddling through "Vichy, " "unoccupied" France, in dirt-poor and forsaken hills (1939-43) -- In Lyon : tightening occupation & self-discovery (1943-4) -- Paris : exam hell, agony of choice, École normale (1944-5) -- Paris : a (rare) foreign student at École polytechnique (1945-7) -- Pasadena : student at Caltech during a Golden Age (1947-9) -- French air force engineers : reserve officer training (1949-50) -- Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera -- Paris : "doctorand" & employee of Philips Electronics (1950-2) -- Modest first Kepler moment : mastering the unevenness of word frequencies (1951) -- No longer a promising youth, yet still seeking role models far away : Wiener, Von Neumann, Kac, Feller -- Apprentice on a grand tour through varied cities and guilds : Cambridge, MA, Princeton, Geneva -- After a year as a French academic, an underachieving and restless maverick pulls roots (1957-58)-- Rise to the rank of IBM fellow at IBM research, during its brilliant golden age in science (1958-93) -- Itinerant teacher : of economics then engineering at Harvard & later of mathematics at Harvard then Yale -- A firebrand newcomer to economics teaches controversial finance at Harvard (1962-3) -- Based at IBM, but ceaselessly moving, back and forth, drawn from one place, mystery, or field to another (1964-79) -- Writing the fractal geometry of nature and pondering my future and that of fractal geometry as a discipline -- At Yale, rising -- aged seventy-five -- to tenure at this university's highest rank, sterling professorship (1987-2004)