Tripping on Psychedelics wouldn't be the same without the "Founder of the Fractal world", Benoit Mandelbrot.
This famous French-American mathematician had a broad interest in practical sciences or what he called "the art of roughness" and "the uncontrolled element in life". Mandelbrot is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry. He referred to himself as a "fractalist", coining the word fractal as well as developing a "theory of roughness" and "self-similarity" in nature. Mandelbrot was born November 20, 1924 and died October 14, 2010 at the age of 85 in Cambridge Massachusetts. A fractal is a self similar subset of Euclidean space whose fractal dimension strictly exceeds its topological dimension. Fractals are geometric shapes that when divided into parts, each part would be a smaller replica of the whole shape, as illustrated in the famous Mandelbrot Set. Fractals exhibit self similarity also known as "expanding symmetry" or "unfolding symmetry". The term "fractal" was first used by Mandelbrot which in Latin means "broken or fractured" and is used to extend the concept of theory that theoretical fractional dimensions form geometric patterns in nature. Fractals are not limited to geometric patterns but can also describe processes in time. Fractal patterns with various degrees of self similarity have been studied in images, structures, and sounds. Mandelbrot received a Masters degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of technology and worked at IBM for 35 years. Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images which led to the discovery of the Mandelbrot set in 1980. In 1993 Mandelbrot was awarded the Wolf prize for physics, the Lewis Fry Richardson prize of the European Geophysical Society in 2000, and the Japan prize in 2003 and he even has a small asteroid named in his honor, the 27500 Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot died at the age of 85 in Cambridge Massachusetts from pancreatic cancer. Mandelbrot's work developed entirely outside mainstream research, which led him to modern information theory. Benoit Mandelbrot was an amazing mathematician and an expert in aerodynamics but will always be remembered as the "father of fractal geometry".