{"id":2674,"date":"2010-10-16T11:13:44","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T19:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2674"},"modified":"2022-12-31T08:29:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-31T16:29:43","slug":"remembering-benoit-mandelbrot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/16\/remembering-benoit-mandelbrot\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Benoit Mandelbrot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benoit Mandelbrot burst upon the public stage with his extravagant work of genius: Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension <\/em>(W. H. Freeman, San Francisco 1977). As Mandelbrot himself might put it, \u201cI know of very few books … in which so many flashes of genius, projected in so many directions, are lost in so thick a gangue of wild notions and extravagance.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

(He made this remark about George Kingsley Zipf\u2019s book, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort<\/em>. The Mandelbrotian word \u201cgangue,\u201d\u009d more commonly used in French, refers to otherwise worthless material in which valuable ores or gems may be found. It\u2019s pronounced like \u201cgang\u201d\u009d in English.)<\/p>\n


\nDetail of the MandelCubicWhoopDiDoo Cubic Mandelbrot Set.<\/em><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s illustrations are recycled from my rather long post from April and May, 2010, \u201cRudy Set as Ultimate Cubic Mandelbrot Set. Quartics & Quintics Too!\u201d\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n

I went to Mandelbrot\u2019s house early in 2001, when I was involved in an abortive project to try and make a large screen (IMAX) science movie featuring some huge, prolonged zooms into the Mandelbrot set.<\/p>\n

The movie, which was to be about fractals, had the working title Search for Infinity<\/em>, a title which was dictated by the producer, Jeff Kirsch, director of the San Diego Space Center Museum. Jeff was committed to presenting the film as being about infinity instead of being about fractals, as he felt many more people would be interested in the former than the latter. And in a mathematical sense, fractals are indeed infinite, in that you can zoom into them, forever finding more levels of detail. It\u2019s an infinity in the small, rather than an infinity in the large.<\/p>\n


\nDetail of MandelCubicInvasionOfTheHrull<\/em><\/p>\n

The very talented film maker Ron Fricke (Konaequaatsu <\/em>and Baraka<\/em>) was committed to shooting the film, and I was going to write the script. Ron and Jeff were also bent on including Arthur Clarke in the movie as a character. And Ron wanted the movie to star a computer-brained space probe who was afraid to fly off into the endless void of interstellar space. Jeff had scored a development grant for the project from the National Science Foundation and we worked on preparing a final proposal over a couple of years.<\/p>\n

Taking all the story constraints into account, I put together ten or eleven successively more refined treatments for a film script, resulting in a fairly reasonable treatment, The Search For Infinity<\/em><\/a>, which you can read online.<\/p>\n

But, like so many films, the project was never realized. The sticking point was that we failed to get the needed the million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation. One reason I visited Mandelbrot was in fact to try and win his support in case the NSF were to ask his opinion about the project, but he was unenthused about it, I don\u2019t know exactly why. One of his issues was that it was wrong to bill the film as being about infinity, when in truth it was about fractals \u2014 I agreed with him on this point, but this wasn\u2019t something that I could get Jeff and Ron to go along with.<\/p>\n


\nDetail of MandelCubicPacMan <\/em><\/p>\n

The rest of this post consists of excerpts of my journal entry of January 14, 2001, regarding my meeting with Benoit. I published this as an endnote to my tome on the meaning of computation, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/a><\/em>, but I thought I\u2019d post it on my blog today as well.<\/p>\n


\nRudyMars<\/em><\/p>\n

Mandelbrot is waiting for me at the end of his driveway, he\u2019s worried I might not find the house as the address on the curb is covered by snow. A white-haired balding man, stocky, somewhat diffident, he sees me, I wave, he doesn\u2019t wave back, not sure yet I\u2019m the one he\u2019s waiting for, when I\u2019m closer he says \u201cAre you Rudy Rucker?\u201d\u009d We introduce ourselves, shake hands, I tell him I\u2019m thrilled to meet him. In the house his wife Aliette greets us, Mandelbrot disappears to take a pee I suppose, then we sit in a cold room with some armchairs. They don\u2019t seem to really heat their house. He sits on an odd modern chair with parts of it missing, a collection of black corduroy hotdogs. He wears a jacket, a vest, a shirt, trousers with a paperclip attached to the fly to make it easier to pull up and down, I guess he\u2019s 75. Rather rotund and, yes, a bit like the Mandelbrot set in his roundness and with the fuzz of hairs on his pate.<\/p>\n


\nRudyFatBud<\/em><\/p>\n

He starts talking almost right away, an incredibly dense and rich flow of information, a torrent. Fractal of course, as human conversation usually is, but of a higher than usual dimension. It\u2019s like talking to a superbeing, just as I\u2019d hoped, like being with a Martian, his conversation a wall of sound paisley info structure, the twittering of the Great Scarab.<\/p>\n

His wife listens attentively as we talk and from time to time she reminds him to tie up some loose thread.<\/p>\n


\nRudyHorse<\/em><\/p>\n

Mandelbrot doesn\u2019t seem overly vain \u2014 as I\u2019d heard him described by some rivals. Certainly he has good self-esteem, but I think it\u2019s well-earned and justified.<\/p>\n

I repeatedly feel a great urge to go out and have a cigarette. The firehose-stream of information in his strong French accent \u2014 I have to cock my ear and listen my hardest to process it. Conscious of his wife watching me listen to him. I imagined she\u2019s judging how well I seem to listen, and when once I smirk as he says something a bit self-aggrandizing, she catches my expression and I imagine her giving me a black mark.<\/p>\n

He isn\u2019t clear exactly what Jeff is trying to do with the movie, how Jeff plans to fund it, what his (Mandelbrot\u2019s) role is supposed to be, etc. I explain it as best I can; we don\u2019t really expect Benoit to do much more than to say that that he doesn\u2019t find our project totally absurd. He seems to want to exact some kind of concession; at the end I have the feeling that he considers Jeff\u2019s emphasis on \u201cinfinity\u201d\u009d to be a deal-breaker, to the extent that there might have been a deal.<\/p>\n


\nRudyRockets (detail of the Rudy Set). Lower down in this post is an animated YouTube zoom to the Rockets.<\/em><\/p>\n

I mention how much he\u2019s affected my view of the world. I mention also that I\u2019m as excited to meet him as I was to meet G\u00f6del. Mandelbrot says, \u201cOh G\u00f6del didn\u2019t talk much, I saw him at the Institute, I was von Neumann\u2019s last student.\u201d\u009d I rejoinder, \u201cWell, G\u00f6del talked a lot when I saw him, I was working on something he was interested in,\u201d\u009d and Benoit is impressed.<\/p>\n

In the event, it\u2019s not really like meeting G\u00f6del because I\u2019m not so young and starry-eyed that I see Mandelbrot as a mythopoetic guru. Yet it is like meeting G\u00f6del in the sense that for these two special oasis hours midway in the long caravan of my life I\u2019m talking to someone whom I feel to be smarter than me. An ascended master.<\/p>\n