First Edition of Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension; Inscribed by Benoit Mandelbrot
Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension.
Item Number: 4120
San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977.
First edition of the mathematician’s groundbreaking work. Quarto, original cloth. Inscribed and dated by Benoit Mandelbrot on the title page. Some foxing to the page edges, very good in an excellent dust jacket with a some light wear to the extremities.
In 1975, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures and first published his ideas in 1975, and later translated, Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. According to mathematics scientist Stephen Wolfram, the book was a "breakthrough" for Mandelbrot, who until then would typically "apply fairly straightforward mathematics ... to areas that had barely seen the light of serious mathematics before." Wolfram adds that as a result of this new research, he was no longer a "wandering scientist", and later called him "the father of fractals": Until Mandelbrot, most mathematicians believed the irregular shapes found in nature were too fragmented or amorphous to be described mathematically. However in the 1960s and 1970s, Mandelbrot developed his concept of fractal geometry, which helped bring order to complex problems in physics, biology, and even financial markets.