Benoit and known tradition

The flash news amidst the jubilant tidings of rescue of miners showed that Benoit Mandelbrot - the mathematician had passed away. He was aged 85, a Mandelbrotian exception to prodigiously short lives of some of his equals in mathematical talent.

To pass away on Dussehra must be significant and should make for an interesting circumstance for ALV to expound upon in terms Hindu tradition. But what comes to mind, is my grandmother, whom I found weeping silently near the lamp lit for Appa's funeral in the middle of the night. In her own way, she explained that the soul lingers on to see if there is someone somewhere that cares for its existence and feels sad if there is no one mourning.

Rama Ganapathigal who officiated over Appa’s funeral mentioned in his funeral speech on the thirteenth, that tradition says even one brahmin (read true follower) uttering words of praise during the funeral period is enough pretext for the archangels to admit the soul in paradise.

I am sure Benoit Mandelbrot will find many.

Here’s a quatrain in tribute -

This is Benoit, the exceptional Mandelbrot,


Who always thought, why others did not,


Separate the fraction as to make it integral,


And the let the world differentiate between it and - the fractal.


“To come very near true theory and to grasp its precise application are two very different things as history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it” – When Whitehead said this in 1925 little did he realise that the just born Benoit would live his whole life as if to justify the very words that he uttered. Or maybe Whitehead wrote it as a soothsayer might on the birth of a rare talent.

Long after a professor at an international conference reprimanded my juvenile mix-up of the fractional and the fractal, I read that Benoit had spent a lifetime in pursuit of it.

Fractal is a word Mandelbrot used for the first time to describe the geometry of the rough and broken – from the Latin original fractus or fractured. Fractality, as I read later, was the repetition of geometric patterns at different scales revealing smaller and smaller versions of themselves. (just as the infinite jivatmas reveal smaller and and smaller versions of the Brhat Atma)

Peace be upon him.