Benoit Mandelbrot and Martin Gardner

Benoit Mandelbrot died last week of pancreatic cancer. Although the public may not know him by name, he is well known for developing and popularizing the idea of fractals. In fact, the quintessential fractal bears his name- the Mandelbrot set:



I don't get as excited by fractals as some people do, but I like that Mandelbrot's work led to them entering the public consciousness. As someone who has enjoyed math my whole life, I've always liked slowly becoming aware of the beauty of a piece of mathematics as I start to understand the underlying structures. Fractals are a visual representation of that same beauty that make it accessible to just about anyone. Mandelbrot made many significant contributions to mathematics itself, but he deserves special credit for making it easier for the average person to see the beauty of mathematics. (I should add that he was also a professor at Yale towards the end of his life and received tenure at the age of 75.)

I also learned today that Martin Gardner died last spring. Gardner wrote an immensely popular mathematical games column for Scientific American as well as a large number of books. He is well known for having popularized Conway's Game of Life and the work of M.C. Escher, among other things. He had no formal mathematical training, but he had a knack for finding interesting, challenging puzzles. In my mind, Gardner was an evangelist spreading the idea mathematics is more about creativity than about applying tedious memorized algorithms. Far too many Americans associate math with suffering through exercises like "Simplify (37a + b - 3c)/(13-2a^2) + (7c-a)/(4b^2+53c) + (55 + 22b)/(66 + c)." Just as Mandelbrot's showed Americans the inherent beauty of mathematics, Gardner's column showcased puzzles that rewarded creativity rather than blind application of memorized formulas.

It's no secret that mathematics has an image problem in America. If you tell someone that you're an English major, more likely than not they'll talk about how they love reading too. By contrast, when I tell people that I'm majoring in math, the standard reaction is a mix of horror and incomprehension. No wonder, then, the our country is suffering from a shortage of competent mathematicians and scientists. In different ways, Mandelbrot and Gardner both did a little to help our country move past its distaste for math. Their deaths are a loss for us all.