Benoît Mandelbrot – further notes
Article Type: Benoît Mandelbrot – further notes From: Kybernetes, Volume 40, Issue 9/10
Professor Robert Vallée has added some further details to the obituary notice for Benoît Mandelbrot (Kybernetes, Vol. 40 No. 1/2, pp. 336-7):
The uncle of B.M. (Szolem Mandelbrot) was Professor at Collège de France (an institution comparable to the Institute of Advanced Study of Princeton).
B.M. was a student at École Polytechnique. In his doctoral thesis,devoted to linguistics, information and theory of games, he introduced a generalization of Zipf’s law.
In 1952 he gave a lecture at Cercle d’Études Cybernétiques(which R.V. founded in 1950) on the links between the statistical structure of language and possible properties of brain.
His ideas on probabilities were influenced by Paul Lévy and his theory of fractals by Gaston Julia, both professors of mathematical analysis at École Polytechnique.
