Look Who it Was Random video

Benoît Mandelbrot - The invitation from IBM (43/144)

700 views · Published 21 August 2017 · 1:04 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To listen to more of Benoît Mandelbrot’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ABtOHVhr6E&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwl4HlrIKxKmdpBAGYJ9AbR

The late French-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot (1924-2010) discovered his ability to think about mathematics in images while working with the French Resistance, and is famous for his work on fractal geometry, the maths of the shapes found in nature. [Listeners: Bernard Sapoval and Daniel Zajdenweber; date recorded: 1998].

TRANSCRIPT: I was invited to IBM by someone who was there as a young scientist, who had previously been a programmer in Von Neumann's computer division, and IBM was trying to hire people in gigantic numbers and they made me an offer like everybody else. I mean there was no great distinction of getting an offer from IBM then. And I agreed to come for the summer. So when I came I had on one hand a very strong reputation of having done acrobatic work in several esoterica; on the other hand, hardly anybody followed my work because the work was not sufficiently important in itself, or perhaps because I left when things were getting too difficult. And then I think my period of, how to say, wanderings, in terms of places, ends, and I started the middle part of my life in which I accomplished many things in a more coherent fashion.

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