Normal schooling didn’t fit
like wearing shoes too narrow.
He had a special gift to see
the geometry of messy things;
to question what nobody else thought.
That was Benoît Mandelbrot.
How do coastlines get their shapes
flowers and snails and mountaintops?
Why do lungs and brains resemble branches?
What makes those patterns when you close your eyes?
How can chaos make such symmetries?
These became his studies.
Anatomy, taxonomy, neurology
meteorology, hydrology, cosmology,
geology, information technology,
engineering, chaos theory, metallurgy.
He saw self-similarity in it all.
Replications in broken bits he called fractals.
And these were not just pretty patterns.
He should have won a Nobel Prize
but in which discipline? From economics
to medical imaging, he changed
the way we see everything; from a sneeze
to the formation of galaxies.
Oh, without him there would still be
economic forecasts, leaves and trees.
But we need to celebrate the life of
Benoît Mandelbrot, who, 100 years ago today,
became a part of nature’s great equation,
part of its intelligent imagination.
