What's In A Name?

The Mandelbrot set

I'd like to devote my post today to one of my greatest artistic inspirations, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who died Thursday at the age of 85.  Mandelbrot, who coined the term "fractal" to describe irregular shapes that are infinitely self-similar, was an innovative scholar and a pioneer in the field of fractal geometry and chaos theory.

My own interest in the topic, which developed while I was studying painting at Boston University, is the reason for the title of this blog.  Fractals describe the shape of the world we live in, from the microscopic beauty of an individual snow crystal to the epic grandeur of growing nebulae.  The study of fractals is fundamentally about the recognition of patterns in seemingly random forms and events, and I believe that this principle applies equally to art.

Fractal patterning continues to play a major role in my drawings and paintings, and for this I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Mandelbrot and the countless other scientists and mathematicians who work in this field.  I am particularly grateful for publications such as Exploring Chaos (ed. Nina Hall), now quite outdated at nearly 20 years old, that dissect these phenomena for a general audience.