| 1 | Name: | Dr. Benoit B. Mandelbrot | |
| Institution: | Yale University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2004 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1924 | ||
| Death Date: | October 14, 2010 | ||
His Wolf Prize citation hails Benoit Mandelbrot for having "changed our view of nature", and IBM had cited him earlier in words that have been repeatedly confirmed: "Few contemporary scholars have made such penetrating contributions to as many fields of physical and social science. . . His success, where others have faltered, has been due to a combination of command of mathematical tools, extraordinary breadth, and even rarer intellectual courage." Fractal geometry, which he pioneered and named, also changed the way students and the world at large view mathematics and science. In pure mathematics, examination of masterful computer graphics led him to conjectures of great taste and difficulty that brought several slowly moving fields to intense activity. His observations revived iteration theory after a half century of forced inactivity; but his MLC conjecture (that the "Mandelbrot set is locally connected") is still unsolved after more than a quarter century. In probability theory, his conjecture that the boundary of a segment of Brownian notion is of dimension 4/3 was only proved after 18 years. He broadened the scope of physics by quantifying for the first time a holdover basic sensation, showing that the roughness of typical surfaces can actually be measured by a fractal dimension or Hölder exponent that turned out to be a new "universal." He showed how the support of intermittent turbulence can be measured and how the physics of diverse clusters is determined by their fractal geometry. In economics he enunciated the scaling principle in the 1960s, and his models for price variation, including his later notion of variable (fractal) trading time, are central to current developments in finance. A native of Poland, Benoit Mandelbrot became Docteur d'Etat ès Sciences Mathématiques in Paris in 1952. He was IBM Fellow Emeritus in Physics and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University at the time of his death on October 14,2010, at the age of 85. | |||