The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot; Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking

by Nina Samuel

• ISBN13: 9780300186437
• ISBN10: 0300186436
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2012-10-30
• Publisher: Bard Center

Summary

Over the last few decades, the "pictorial turn" in the natural sciences, prompted by the computer's capacity to produce visual representations, has generated considerable theoretical interest. Poised between their materiality and the abstract level they are meant to convey, scientific images are always intersections of form and meaning. Benoit Mandelbrot (19242010), one of the best-known producers of digital images in scientific and industrial research, was particularly curious about the ways in which the materiality of scientific representation was able to influence the development of the ideas and abstractions the images embodied. Using images and objects found in Mandelbrot's office, this book questions the relationship between the visual and scientific reasoning in fractal geometry and chaos theory, among the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the last century. These unpublished materials offer new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas. Work by Adrien Douady and Otto Rossler provides historical depth to the analysis.

Author Biography

Nina Samuel is a visiting assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center and an associate member of the Das Technische Bild in Germany.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 7
Introduction	p. 10
The Visibility of Islands: On Imagination, Seduction, and Materiality	p. 18
Found Images I: Islands of Discovery: Sequentiality, Scribbles, and the Waste of Thought Processes	p. 62
Pictures of a Higher Order	p. 83
Found Images II: Order, Disorder, Beauty	p. 90
Seeing Order in Disorder	p. 96
Found Images III: Images of Reality	p. 102
The Fractal View: Nature in Mandelbrot's Geometry	p. 114
Found Images IV: Pictures of Chance	p. 120
Chains of Chance: A Convoluted History of Pattern Recognition	p. 133
Found Images V: Scaling as Pictorial Strategy: Scale Ambivalence and Openness to Interpretation	p. 140
Scalebound Bauhaus	p. 148
The Eye Is Not Specialized! Benoît Mandelbrot Talks with	p. 154
Bibliography	p. 160
Index	p. 169
Photographic Credits	p. 174
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