Podcast
The Ezra Klein Show
Ezra highlighted it as Mandelbrot's autobiography that tells the fascinating story of the creator of fractal geometry and his struggle for acceptance.
So this book is called The Fractalist, Memoirs of a Scientific Maverick by Benoit Mandelbrot. And this is the pioneer of the geometry of fractals, which is the geometry of complex shapes that we see i...
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Ezra highlighted it as Mandelbrot's autobiography that tells the fascinating story of the creator of fractal geometry and his struggle for acceptance.
So this book is called The Fractalist, Memoirs of a Scientific Maverick by Benoit Mandelbrot. And this is the pioneer of the geometry of fractals, which is the geometry of complex shapes that we see in nature. And this is his own autobiography. It is really a fascinating story about a mathematical genius who is not accepted for many, many years by society because his genius was so wide that it could not fit in any given disciplinary box. And it was only at a very old age that he finally was tenured at Yale. I believe he was given tenure at 75 years old. So it's a fascinating story about creativity, and it's always nice to be reminded of the spirit of creativity and also the resistance to creativity that we experience in the human world.