CLOUDS ARE NOT SPHERES

'The book is well-illustrated, earlier chapters with monochrome portraits of Mandelbrot, his family and those who influenced him, and later ones with striking colour pictures not only of the Mandelbrot set and other computer generated fractals, but also of ‘real’ fractals including cloud formations and rural and mountain scenes … This celebration of Mandelbrot’s scientific life is largely based on interviews that the author had with him when making films on his work … A challenge for historians of mathematics and science in coming years will be to produce a more broadly contextual and rounded account of the advent of fractals.'The time is right, following Benoît Mandelbrot's death in 2010, to publish this landmark book about the life and work of this maverick math genius.This compact book celebrates the life and achievements of Benoît Mandelbrot with the ideas of fractals presented in a way that can be understood by the interested lay-person. Mathematics is largely avoided. Instead, Mandelbrot's ideas and insights are described using a combination of intuition and pictures. The early part of the book is largely biographical, but it portrays well how Mandelbrot's life and ideas developed and led to the fractal notions that are surveyed in the latter parts of the book.