TED Talk Thursday – Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness
According to TEDTalks: “At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 — the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.”
“Studying complex dynamics in the 1970s, Benoit Mandelbrot had a key insight about a particular set of mathematical objects: that these self-similar structures with infinitely repeating complexities were not just curiosities, as they’d been considered since the turn of the century, but were in fact a key to explaining non-smooth objects and complex data sets — which make up, let’s face it, quite a lot of the world. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to describe these objects, and set about sharing his insight with the world.”
Enjoy.
For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”
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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!
