Mandelbrot, Marriage, and Math

October 2011

(Piece of screen shot from First Youtube Link below)

 One year has passed since the death of beloved mathematician and writer Benoit Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010).  Mandelbrot was one of my heroes: a charming bundle of enthusiasm and a genuine genius whose creative mind was born from the blessed union of knowledge and imagination.  He and his works can be a joy to contemplate.

But, for me, thinking of Mandelbrot and the anniversary this past week welled up painful and wearing memories.  Memories of the tense and conflicted thread that has constricted my life; my long, trying relationship with – Mathematics !  

Although many believed her to be my true calling, I could not find it in my heart to love her, and finally we parted.

For most of my early life, it was assumed by my family, my teachers, and anyone who knew me well that I was destined to spend my life wedded to math.  But I knew that the marriage, were it to have taken place, be consummated, and hold, would have been a dry, tradition-soaked arrangement, and I resisted my family’s wishes. 

I complained that there had never been any real courtship or wooing; all had been preordained by the genetics of my accounting-bookkeeping tribe blended with the cultural traditions of the poorer, laboring-class branch of my family.  Both clans associated anything to do with numbers and counting to the means of climbing the socio-economic ladder.  If math favoured you in any way, you should pursue her with abandon.  Period.

For a brief time, I tried to accept my predestined fate rationalizing that if I did, I would avoid the pressures of making the perfect life choice and wasted years spent in a fruitless search for the “right one.”  In addition to earning the automatic approval of my kin, the path with math had lure of a stable and enduring relationship and bond.

But math seemed tedious as well as straightforward.

“I don’t like her,” I screamed tantrum-like at one low point. “She’s so ugly and boring.”

Math, it seemed, lacked the grace, beauty, and the liberal passion of the creative arts, and I twisted between the pull of one and the push toward the other.  My personal struggle intensified as the years went on and as more and more matchmaking assessments in the Guidance Counselor’s office attested to my duty to math.  Later, my arts program in university morphed insidiously into a mathematics degree as a function of course choices based upon what I found easiest.

That was the breaking point.  The incompatibility of a mathematics major within an arts degree caused me to bolt from the altar of higher education and run from the cultural forces that were still trying to compel me into a career mathematical.   

Aside from ephemeral liaisons with accounting during desperate periods of instability  and late-life grad studies flirting with statistics, I did a fair job of evading mathematics and the torment associated with it for the next few decades.

Then, I encountered Mandelbrot.

I never actually met the man.  We corresponded for a while, and I did speak to him on the phone once about a decade ago on the logistical arrangements for a conference in Ottawa.  

The conference was at Canada’s National Arts Centre – the subject was creativity  - he was to participate remotely  and speak about  the arts and - math !!

As I learned more about his work and listened to him speak on the phone and via live satellite link, I was shaken by the thought that the life I had lived had been misguided and a sad falsehood as well as a disappointment to those of the village that cared for me so many years earlier.

Professor Mandelbrot, a Polish-born, French-educated American of Jewish Lithuanian heritage, showed me the folly of artificial boundaries between peoples and between science, art, and nature as well as the box we create for ourselves when we see our choices as being one or the other. 

“All exist in each other,” he said.

Mandelbrot, decisively regarded as the Father of Fractal Geometry, conducted influential research in fields running from physics, aeronautics, and finance to art, computer science, geometry, and, of course, mathematics.  While his theories and works are perhaps only appreciated in a technical sense by advanced students of math, all the world has the capacity to appreciate his insights into the nature of - nature - and the concept of self-similarity that he popularized through his enthusiastic writings and teaching about fractals.

The great mathematician appeared on a giant screen in June 2000 with the wonderful Canadian author Jane Urquhart on the NAC stage.  In introducing Mandelbrot, the writer confessed that she felt that she “would have been a much better … English and History student” if she had been exposed to more science and math and had recognized that “both scientists and artists are rooted in the perceived world.”

Mandelbrot, who was recognized at the time primarily for the impact fractals had in explaining and defining the irregular in the physical world, told the audience that more and more references for the application of his fractal geometry were coming from the creative arts, particularly music.

“They tell me how a piece of music is a whole with parts within parts within parts,” the math marvel said noting that arts, science, math and all of life is “just one big unified cloth … there is no marker on earth stating that you are leaving math and entering (art and)… music.”

He said that the problem for young students lies in the fact that they are presented only with “the plumbing of mathematics, which is essential but rather dry and difficult.”  Mandelbrot, who reportedly first recognized the full potential of fractals when looking at Salvador Dali’s Face of War (low-res image presented here for the non-copyright-infringing purpose of insightful, educational critical commentary on the artistic genre), encouraged me and about a thousand others sitting in the theatre that day to think of math as the study of “patterns and structure … that transcends into everything.”  His comments reminded me that Pythagoras, working at the origins of modern math, had worked exclusively with lines in the sand, squares, and shapes to elucidate the magical, world-changing formula “the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the square of the other two sides.”

Not sure what Mandelbrot is talking about  -   or what the heck a “fractal” is ? 

Well, you could go out and buy a text book and review schematics of the plumbing of math – or you could just click here (a visualization of the Mandelbrot (mathematical) Set - screenshot above), or here.

Sit back, watch, and see why math is art, why art is math, why both are beauty, and why mathematics, if I had given her a chance and learned to love her over time, might just well have been my vocational soul mate after all.



(And Here - a still image that is also a Mandelbrot-inspired mathematical equation).