SWMM56

THE MATHEMATICS OF ROUGHNESS Jim Holt  reviews Benoit B. Mandelbrot's  The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick , in the NYRB: Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity. To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does  that  look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magn...