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.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, O.L.H., Ph.D. (Mathematical Sciences, University of Paris, 1952; M.S., Aeronautics, California Institute of Technology, 1949) was a mathematician best known as the father of fractal geometry. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University; IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center; and Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Mandelbrot was born in Poland, but his family moved to France when he was a child; he was a dual French and American citizen and was educated in France. He has been awarded with numerous honors, including induction into the Legion d'honneur, as well as the 1986 Franklin Medal for Physics, the 1993 Wolf Prize for Physics, the 2000 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal of the European Geophysical Society, and the 2003 Japan Prize "for the creation of universal concepts in complex systems."