"It is only twenty-three years since Benoit Mandelbrot published his famous picture of what is now called the Mandelbrot Set. The graphics were state of the art, though now they may seem primitive. But how that picture has changed our views of the mathematical and physical universe! Fractals, a term coined by Mandelbrot, are now so ubiquitous in the scientific conscience that it is difficult to remember the psychological shock of their arrival. What we see in this book is a glimpse of how Mandelbrot helped change our way of looking at the world. It is not just a book about a particular class of problems, but contains a view on how to approach the mathematical and physical universe. This view is certain not to fade, but to be part of the working philosophy of the next mathematical revolution, wherever it may take us. So read the book, look at the beautiful pictures that continue to fascinate and amaze, and enjoy! "

From the foreword by Peter W Jones, Yale University

This heavily illustrated book combines hard-to-find early papers by the author with additional chapters that describe the historical background and context. Key topics are quadratic dynamics and its Julia and Mandelbrot sets, nonquadratic dynamics, Kleinian limit sets, and the Minkowski measure. Benoit B Mandelbrot is Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University and IBM Fellow Emeritus (Physics) at the IBM T J Watson Research Center. He was awarded the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1993 and the Japan Prize for Science and Technology in 2003.

Klappentext

Just 23 years ago Benoit Mandelbrot published his famous picture of the Mandelbrot set, but that picture has changed our view of the mathematical and physical universe. In this text, Mandelbrot offers 25 papers from the past 25 years, many related to the famous inkblot figure. Of historical interest are some early images of this fractal object produced with a crude dot-matrix printer. The text includes some items not previously published.

Inhalt

Foreword by Peter W JonesPrefaceQuadratic Julia and Mandelbrot SetsNonQuadratic Rational DynamicsIterated Nonlinear Function Systems and the Fractal Limit Sets of Kleinian GroupsMultifractal Invariant MeasuresBackground and HistoryBibliography Index.