The Fractalist
Subtitle: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
By: Benoit Mandelbrot.
Publisher: Pantheon Books; Pantheon
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780307377357
Subjects: Mandelbrot, Benoit B; Mathematicians -- France -- Biography; Fractals
Genres: Biography
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Chance, then free choice, shape a living, fast evolving, and ceaselessly wandering fossil; title: Unrelated deeds or a unified fractal approach to roughness?; title: Could the Mandelbrot set really be the most complex object in the whole of mathematics?; title: Roots, of flesh and the mind; title: Child in Warsaw (1924-36); title: Long summer in today's Belarus; title: Adolescent in Paris (1936-9); title: Muddling through "Vichy," "unoccupied" France, in dirt-poor and forsaken hills (1939-43); title: In Lyon : tightening occupation & self-discovery (1943-4); title: Paris : exam hell, agony of choice, École normale (1944-5); title: Paris : a (rare) foreign student at École polytechnique (1945-7); title: Pasadena : student at Caltech during a Golden Age (1947-9); title: French air force engineers : reserve officer training (1949-50); title: Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera; title: Paris : "doctorand" & employee of Philips Electronics (1950-2); title: Modest first Kepler moment : mastering the unevenness of word frequencies (1951); title: No longer a promising youth, yet still seeking role models far away : Wiener, Von Neumann, Kac, Feller; title: Apprentice on a grand tour through varied cities and guilds : Cambridge, MA, Princeton, Geneva; title: After a year as a French academic, an underachieving and restless maverick pulls roots (1957-58); title: Rise to the rank of IBM fellow at IBM research, during its brilliant golden age in science (1958-93); title: Itinerant teacher : of economics then engineering at Harvard & later of mathematics at Harvard then Yale; title: A firebrand newcomer to economics teaches controversial finance at Harvard (1962-3); title: Based at IBM, but ceaselessly moving, back and forth, drawn from one place, mystery, or field to another (1964-79); title: Writing the fractal geometry of nature and pondering my future and that of fractal geometry as a discipline; title: At Yale, rising - aged seventy-five - to tenure at this university's highest rank, sterling professorship (1987-2004).