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Islands of Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos and the Materiality of Thinking
Tuesday January 8, 2013 from 11:00am - 5:00pm
At his death in 2010, Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of fractal geometry, left a mass of idiosyncratically organized drawings, computer print-outs, films, manuscript scribbles, objects, and photographs in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an extraordinary trove to which Mandelbrot's wife, Aliette, generously allowed Bard Graduate Center Visiting Assistant Professor Nina Samuel access. To explore it was like wandering through the mathematician's brain--like witnessing the ephemeral traces of his very thought processes. Selections from these materials form the core of the exhibition. Islands are central to Mandelbrot's work, associated in his thinking with both the inspiring and the seductive role of images. They challenge his own dictum that !seeing is believing' and point to the interaction between the hand and computer visualizations to generate new ideas. Frequently, the computer alone is unable to give an insight, and hand drawing becomes necessary for transforming a confusing computer image into a new idea or theory. Along with this rare look into Mandelbrot's working process, previously never exhibited sketches from his contemporaries--the French mathematician Adrien Douady, the German biochemist Otto E. Rossler--will also be featured to investigate this specific role of the scientist's hand. Additionally, the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, will be represented by loans from the Library of Congress.

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