Turtles all the way down...
October 16, 2010 8:45 PM   Subscribe

Benoit Mandlebrot, the mathematician who coined the term fractal and who brought zn+1 = zn2 + c into our lives, has passed away at 85. Previously, previouser, & c... Mandlebrot unwittingly continued the work of the 13th century Benedictine monk Edo of Aachen.
posted by daHIFI (8 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: previously -- jessamyn



 
Like this turtle, for example.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:48 PM on October 16, 2010


Wait, am I just zoomed in closer to what I thought was a previous post?
posted by Scoo at 8:49 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]


dammit, I gogled and searched the front page and... arghhh....

Mods please delete.
posted by daHIFI at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2010


fractals...they just zoom in on themselves and repeat...
posted by HuronBob at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2010


Should have known better than to think I would have beat someone to this here.
posted by daHIFI at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2010


Wait, isn't this just a smaller version of the original post? How do we even know where the original post stops?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:50 PM on October 16, 2010


Mandlebrot unwittingly continued the work of the 13th century Benedictine monk Edo of Aachen.

Also this is not true, the page was a joke. In fact complex numbers: which are used in the mandlebrot set weren't even in use until the 16th century:
The earliest fleeting reference to square roots of negative numbers perhaps occurred in the work of the Greek mathematician and inventor Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD, when, apparently inadvertently, he considered the volume of an impossible frustum of a pyramid,[5] though negative numbers were not conceived in the Hellenistic world.

Complex numbers became more prominent in the 16th century, when closed formulas for the roots of cubic and quartic polynomials were discovered by Italian mathematicians (see Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia, Gerolamo Cardano). It was soon realized that these formulas, even if one was only interested in real solutions, sometimes required the manipulation of square roots of negative numbers. For example, Tartaglia's cubic formula gives the following solution to the equation x3 − x = 0,
posted by delmoi at 8:59 PM on October 16, 2010


delmoi, look at the date on that article.
posted by madcaptenor at 9:04 PM on October 16, 2010


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