Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Fractals, Dies at 85
"His work on fractals has become a foundation of Chaos theory and is critical to many applications and systems, ranging from digital compression on computers, modeling turbulence on aircraft wing designs, and texturing medical images."
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Off to listen to Jonathon Coulton's Mandelbrot Set in memory.
Mandelbrot's work was such a relief. I'd become seriously disillusioned with physics when, even with incredibly difficult mathematics, we couldn't reliably solve many-body problems, much less explain things that are really difficult. Mandelbrot showed that complex behavior could be modeled simply. I believe there are still underlying principles which his math only models, but he made a major breakthrough when we needed one. Adieu.