Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the Yale professor who gave the world mathematical tools to describe such complex phenomena as clouds and the patterns of leaves on trees, died last week at the age of 85. The ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- What do mountains, broccoli and the stock market have in common? The answer to that question may best be explained by fractals, the branch of geometry that explains irregular shapes ...

A gallery of images spawned by the theories of the innovative mathematician, who died Oct. 14 at the age of 85 The Mandelbrot set, which is most commonly represented by the above illustration, ...

When it comes to the study of both human nature and the natural world, one must be willing to reckon with the fact that a certain degree of chaos will be present in whatever facets of this planet they ...

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line. —Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature As the ...

The image above, generated from a relatively simple mathematical formula, has become iconic and permanently connected with the man who identified it: mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. But its iconic ...

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones … and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line,” wrote Benoît Mandelbrot, contradicting more than 2,000 years of misconceptions ...

Randomness is all around you…or so you think. Consider the various shapes of the morning clouds, the jagged points of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the twists and turns of England’s coastline and the ...