The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick

"A heroic story of discovery. . . . Illustrate[s] what it takes for great new science to be created." --Stephen Wolfram, The Wall Street Journal

"Mandelbrot had the kind of beautiful, buzzing mind that made even gifted fellow scientists feel shabby around the edges. . . . The Fractalist evokes the kinds of deceptively simple questions Mandelbrot asked . . . and the profound answers he supplied." --The New York Times

"Fascinating and engaging . . . A compelling look at one of the greatest multidisciplinary thinkers of the 21st century." --Wired.com

"Mandelbrot was a spell-worker who saw connections no one else did and united apparently disparate phenomena. The mathematics of fractals--and pictures of the Mandelbrot set--offered many budding mathematicians their first taste of 'real' mathematics, in all its beauty, utility and sheer unexpectedness." --The Economist

"The delight Mandelbrot took in roughness, brokenness, and complexity, in forms that earlier mathematicians had regarded as 'monstrous' or 'pathological, ' has a distinctly modern flavor. Indeed, with their intricate patterns that recur endlessly on ever tinier scales, Mandelbrot's fractals call to mind the definition of beauty offered by Baudelaire: C'est l'infini dans le fini." --New York Review of Books

"If you love fractals, you will love this memoir. . . . Mandelbrot describes his life and times with both introspection and humor." --New York Journal of Books

"Charmingly written . . . The memoir of a brilliant mathematician who never thought of himself as a mathematician." --Kirkus Reviews

"Captures the enthusiasm as well as the memories of a visionary who loved nothing better than studying complex multidisciplinary concepts." --Publishers Weekly

"[Mandelbrot's] work has spread and impacted so many fields that there's nobody in the world who is broad enough to appreciate the full impact. . . . [His] mix of gall and genius gave him license to ask the questions no one else did." --Thomas Theis, director of physical sciences at IBM Research

"Mandelbrot brings us back to the sense of the wonder of things, without giving up the logic." --John Briggs, author of Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos

"When we talk about the impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, [Mandelbrot] is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years." --Heinz-Otto Peitgen, professor of mathematics and biomedical sciences at the University of Bremen