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Homage To Madelbrot (from the series Photosyntheticism)
Benoît Mandelbrot escaped the holocaust. He was born in Warsaw, into a Jewish Lithuanian family, that fled from Poland to France in 1936. He completed his education at the École Polytechnique in Paris, during the war, while the Nazis failed to notice his ethnicity. When the war was over he studied aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology before returning to the University of Paris where he earned a Ph D in 1952.
Mandelbrot discovered, to the surprise of the world, that price changes in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution, but preferred to play out in Lévy stable distributions with infinite variance. Turning his attention to the heavens, he explained why the sky is dark at night. He had already fallen into the fractal world, positing that the universe was fractally distributed and thus, even if no big bang had occurred, the night would necessarily be dark.
Mandelbrot had discovered a rich vein of mathematics, which seemed to display the whole geometry of nature. He invented the word “fractal” and gave is name to the most famous fractal of all, the Madelbrot Set. The photosyntheticized image above is a depiction of the Mandelbrot set reflected against itself 3 times using an autocoloring filter and technique.