BENOIT MANDELBROT AND FRACTALS.

BENOIT MANDELBROT AND FRACTALS. Benoit Mandelbrot has died. I have posted on his insights into the financial system, in particular the insight that “rare events’ are much more frequent than people in financial markets have assumed by using normal or “bell-shaped curves.” (a normal distribution would predict that the Dow-Jones average “should have moved by more than 4.5% on six days; it did so on 366. It should have moved by more than 7% only once in every 300,000 years; in the 20th century it did so 48 times.”) Mandelbrot was one of the great mathematicians.Mandelbrot named fractals and found numerous applications of fractals in explaining things that occurred in nature. This wikipedia article on Mandelbrot says that he turned fractals into “essential tools for the long-stalled effort to extend the scope of science to non-smooth objects in the real world. “