Remembering Mandelbrot ...

Benoit Mandelbrot and Buckminster Fuller were impressive thinkers in their own ways and in their fields, and even if I didn't always understand their works, I was blown away by their innovative approaches.  Mandelbrot died.

Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: How long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.
"Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible," Mandelbrot told The New York Times this year in an interview. "The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite."

A wonderfully gifted scientist.  As the old saying goes, they don't make too many of 'em anymore :(

When asked to look back on his career, Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.
"If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career," he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. "But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line."

I recall watching a PBS program years ago that was all about fractals and fractal geometry and, of course, it included Mandelbrot's observations as well.  I tracked down this video Mandelbrot delivering a TED talk: