The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking

by Nina Samuel (Editor), Jan von Brevern (Contributor), Matthias Bruhn (Contributor)

Over the past few decades, the "pictorial turn" in the natural sciences, prompted by the computer's capacity to produce visual representations, has generated considerable theoretical interest. Poised between their materiality and the abstract level they are meant to convey, scientific images are always intersections of form and meaning. Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), one of the best-known producers of digital images in scientific and industrial research, was particularly curious about the ways in which the materiality of scientific representation was able to influence the development of the ideas and abstractions the images embodied. Using images and objects found in Mandelbrot's office, this book questions the relationship between the visual and scientific reasoning in fractal geometry and chaos theory, among the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the past century. These unpublished materials offer new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas. Work by Adrien Douady and Otto Rössler provides historical depth to the analysis.

Distributed for the Bard Graduate Center, NY

Exhibition Bard Graduate Center (09/20/12–01/27/13)

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2012

Reviews

[Trinity School Summer Reading]

This catalog from a show at Bard Graduate Center explores the use of computing to create visual representations of data by focusing on artifacts from the office of one of the fathers of computer graphics. You get to see pictures of seemingly random dots and read how Mandelbrot and other mathematicians “broke the rules” to rely on visualization as their mathematical muse.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful exhibition companion exploring the role of material in thinking and mathematical reasoning through the sketches (the sketches!) of Mandelbrot, Douardy, and Rossler.. genuinely thought-provoking in the digital & computational era of research and thought