In November 2002, I saw Benoît Mandelbrot’s presentation, “The Fractal Revolution”, in Portland Oregon. It was a short overview and introductory presentation about fractals. I’m an enthusiast, so the content was familiar. The great pleasure was seeing the man himself – Benoît Mandelbrot, the Father of Fractal Geometry – talk about how he revolutionized science, math, and our entire view of the world. Fractal dimensionality explains something truly fundamental about the forms and patterns we see daily. However, fractal dimensionality was unknown before Benoît Mandelbrot’s work, which from the late 60s on illuminated this deep truth about the geometry of the world. During Mandelbrot’s 2002 talk, it struck me how much intuition informed his discovery of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot described looking at the ‘drunkard’s walk’— a kind of ‘random walk’ equation—and “seeing” what its fractal dimension was, intuitively. Such amazing intuitive leaps are familiar in science. The formal steps of providing solid proof soon follow this “eureka” moment, during which the answer is revealed. Mandelbrot’s sudden deciphering of the ‘drunken walk’ is no different from, nor any less significant than, Einstein’s discovery of relativity, Isaac Newton’s apple-inspired understanding of gravity, and the original “eureka” moment, when Archimedes’ bodily volume displaced the water in his tub. Like those intellectual explorers before him, Mandelbrot looked at the world and saw a previously unseen truth. He built on what came before, and in so doing, revolutionized it. Mandelbrot intuited the world’s fractal nature. …
