Benoit Mandelbrot recurses into next iteration at 85

Reader Luke was disappointed that we did not cover this story this weekend, but the father of fractal geometry has passed away.

French-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has died of cancer at the age of 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mandelbrot was most famously known for his work in exploring the mathematical shapes known as "fractals." Fractals are shapes that reproduce themselves infinitely--each offshoot of the shape is an approximate miniature of the original shape (including the offshoots). This property (each part being a miniature of the original shape) is called "self-similarity."

"Fractals are easy to explain, it's like a romanesco cauliflower, which is to say that each small part of it is exactly the same as the entire cauliflower itself," Catherine Hill, a statistician at the Gustave Roussy Institute, told the AFP, "It's a curve that reproduces itself to infinity. Every time you zoom in further, you find the same curve."