Yale Bulletin and Calendar - News (original) (raw)

Benoit Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot is appointed Sterling Professor

Benoit Mandelbrot, who is known worldwide for creating fractal geometry, has been named Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale.

Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" in the 1970s to describe irregular geometric shapes having identical structure at all scales. The revolutionary new paradigm -- centered in physics -- has opened up a new way of looking at the universe by revealing order where chaos was thought to exist. For example, Mandelbrot discovered that many shapes in nature manifest the same irregular pattern on an ever-diminishing scale, such as coastlines, tree branches, clusters of galaxies and even blood vessels. Mandelbrot also communicated fractal phenomena through computer-generated imagery, and once described his work by saying that he "reintroduced the eye to the study of mathematics."

Mandelbrot's earlier work combined linguistics and statistical thermodynamics, as well as mathematics and finance. In the 1960s he demonstrated that price fluctuations in markets are not smooth, as economists believed, but are often discontinuous and are always concentrated in time.

Mandelbrot's multidisciplinary work has influenced fields as diverse as graphic design, astronomy, meteorology, computer science, economics and music. Fractal geometry has even been applied to fluctuations in the stock market.

The mathematician's publications include the books "Les objets fractals" and "The Fractal Geometry of Nature," which have been translated into several languages.

Born in Poland, Mandelbrot moved with his family to France and studied at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He holds M.S. and Ae.E. degrees in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Paris. In 1958, he began a long association with IBM's research laboratories in New York, where he is IBM Fellow Emeritus of the T.J. Watson Research Center.

Mandelbrot joined the Yale faculty in 1987 and was later named the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Paris-Sud, among others.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Yale mathematician has received many awards for his scholarly contributions, including the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics.

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