Citation
(2011), "Benoît Mandelbrot – further notes", Kybernetes, Vol. 40 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2011.06740iaa.018
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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):
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The uncle of B.M. (Szolem Mandelbrot) was Professor at Collège de France (an institution comparable to the Institute of Advanced Study of Princeton).
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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.
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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.
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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.