Fractals - History and People

Georg Cantor, Waclaw Sierpinski and Benoit Mandelbrot

Georg Cantor was the creator of set theory and the Cantor set, the first known fractal. Much of modern mathematics relies on his work, including of course fractals.

Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński was also a set theorist who had interests in function theory and topology as well as number theory. He developed a number of other general fractal shapes besides the Sierpinksi triangle

Benoit Mandelbrot is a mathematician currently affiliated with Yale University. Publications, Mandelbrot's vita, and related materials can be found on Mandelbrot's home page.

Mandelbrot gave an interview to New Scientist in 2004 in which he discusses fractals, what he is doing with them, and other research that he's doing.

In a collection of articles, Mandelbrot discusses philosophy of fractals and their use in education; this article includes a little about the mathematics of fractals as well as interesting history from Mandelbrot's point of view.

Other contributors:

Albrecht Dürer: In the 16th century Dürer, a mathematically-literate Renaissance painter, created an image that resembles a Sierpinski carpet, using pentagons instead of squares.

Gottfried Liebniz discovered recursive self-similarity, an important and necessary characteristic of fractals.

Karl Weierstrass discovered functions that were everywhere continuous, but not differentiable. This is another required characteristic of fractals. Helge von Koch demonstrated how such a function would work by creating the Koch snowflake.

Felix Klein, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia were mathematicians who worked with iterated functions in the complex plain. Ironically, they never knew saw what beautiful graphics their functions generated--all died before computers were used to draw fractals.