The fractalist : memoir of a scientific maverick / Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

New York : Pantheon Books, [2012], ©2012.

xvii, 324 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

1st ed.

Includes index.

Beauty and roughness : introduction -- How I came to be a scientist. Roots, of flesh and the mind -- Child in Warsaw, 1924-36 -- Adolescent in Paris, 1936-39 -- Dirt-poor hills of unoccupied Vichy France, 1939-43 -- On to Lyon : tighter occupation and self-discovery, 1943-44 -- Horse groom near Pommiers-en-Forez, 1944 -- Alleluiah! the War moves away and a new life beckons -- My long and meandering education in science and in life. Paris : exam hell, agony of choice, and one day at the École Normale Superieure, 1944-45 -- A (then rare) foreign student at École Polytechnique, 1945-47 -- Pasadena : student at Caltech during a Golden Age, 1947-49 -- French air force engineers : reserve officer in training, 1949-50 -- Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera -- Life as a grad student and Philips Electronics employee, 1950-52 -- First Kepler moment : the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution of word frequencies, 1951 -- Postdoctoral Grand Tour begins at MIT, 1953 -- Princeton : John von Neumann's last postdoc, 1953-54 -- Paris, 1954-55 -- Wooing and marrying Aliette, 1955 -- In Geneva with Jean Piaget, Mark Kak, and Willy Feller, 1955-1957 -- An underachieving and restless maverick pulls up shallow roots, 1957-58 -- My life's fruitful third stage. At IBM Research through its Golden Age in the sciences, 1958-93 -- At Harvard : firebrand newcomer to finance advances a revolutionary development, 1962-63 -- On to fractals : through IBM, Harvard, MIT, and Yale via economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics, 1963-64 -- Based at IBM, moving from place to place and field to field, 1964-79 -- Annus mirabilis at Harvard : the Mandelbrot Set and other forays into pure mathematics, 1979-80 -- A word and a book : "fractal" and The Fractal Geometry of Nature" -- At Yale : rising to the university's highest rank, Sterling Professorship, 1987-2004 -- Has my work founded the first-ever broad theory of roughness? -- Beauty and roughness : full circle.

Includes bibliographical references and index.