My farewell essay about Benoit Mandelbrot
appears this weekend in the Times Magazine’s year-end issue, The Lives They Lived. It’s here: “Fractal Vision.”
Published on 22 December 2010
My farewell essay about Benoit Mandelbrot appears this weekend in the Times Magazine’s year-end issue, The Lives They Lived. It’s here: “Fractal Vision.”
Dear James Gleick:
I just read your article about Benoit. I did not know he had died and do feel saddened by his passing.
Your article is excellent.
I met Benoit at IBM, Yorktown in 1983. Richard Voss, a physicist at IBM was working with Benoit, writing software for fractals. Besides helping Benoit make selections of images for his book on Fractals, my husband Jack, a Pediatrician who also died at 85 of Pancreatic Cancer, and I became friends of Benoit and his wife Aliette. Unfortunately, our communication lessened after I completed a two-year period at IBM and returned to Bell Labs in MH. However, I did arrange a lunch at our house in NJ with Benoit, Aliette and Bela Julesz and Margit. Benoit and Bela knew of each other but had never met. It was a wonderful afternoon watching and listening to these two giants interact.
I am a n admirer of your writing and look forward to rereading your “Chaos” on my Kindle.
Thank you for capturing the amazing Benoit I knew.
Best wishes to you and yours for a Healthy and Happy New Year.
Lillian Schwartz
Hi James,
Good old Mandelbrot! Today I happened to learn a way to make our old CHAOS program run (maybe) on all platforms: Linux, Windows 7, and Mac. Check out my blog post about it, with a download page link at
http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2011/01/24/the-classic-chaos-software-goes-multiplatform/\
As ever,
Rudy