Benoit Mandelbrot's Life

By nickmlee

  • Benoit Mandelbrot's Birth

    in Warsaw, Poland

  • Benoit and his family flee to France to escape the Nazis

    *Exact date unknown Benoit later goes to the countryside to avoid the Nazis again.

  • Took entrance exams to École Polytechnique and passed without the standard 2 years of preparation

  • Earned diploma at École Polytechnique in France

    *Exact date unknown

  • Earned M.S.at California Institute of Technology

    *Exact date unknown
  • Period: to

    Worked as a mathematician for Phillips Electronics in Paris

    *Exact dates unknown

  • Earned Ph.D. at University of Paris

    *Exact date unknown
  • Period: to

    Taught as junior professor of mathematics

    at the University of Geneva in Switzerland
  • Period: to

    Worked at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

    in New York
  • Period: to

    Studied records of the Nile River, replacing the existing flood prediction model

    (In the 60s)

  • Published "How Long is the Coast of Britain?"

    Introduced his ideas of infinite complexity--and the idea of an infinitely long coastline if you looked close enough.

  • Wrote a fractal-generation algorithm while working for IBM which could generate images that looked similar to real landforms.

  • Period: to

    IBM Fellow

    *Exact dates unknown
    The highest level award a researcher at IBM can be awarded. http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/awards_fellows.shtml

  • Published Les Objets fractals: forme, hasard et dimension

    *Date unknown This began his career as a mathematician. While others had published information about fractals, Mandelbrot was the first to publish information about their geometry.

  • Published The Fractal Geometry of Nature

    *Date unknown This book expanded upon Mandelbrot's original work on fractals, demonstrating their presence throughout nature.
  • Period: to

    Teaches math at Yale as an assistant professor

  • Period: to

    Member of IBM Academy of Technology

    *Dates unknown

  • Won the Wolf Prize for physics for his discovery of fractal occurance in nature and the application of math to describe nature.

    *Date not known
  • Period: to

    Teaches math at Yale as a full time professor

  • Won Japan Prize for Science and Technology from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan

    *Exact date unknown

  • Benoit Mandelbrot dies of pancreatic cancer

    at the age of 85.