18
“I’m going to tell this backwards from the way I learned,” Dillon started. He had been worried that the years had faded his recollections. But soon as he started coding in the mathematical structure, it all came flooding back. “First about the man, then about his discovery. Is that okay?”
“I guess.” Elena drew out the words, watching her mom more than Dillon.
“The man’s name was Benoit Mandelbrot, and he was born in Warsaw. His father traded in used clothing. When he was eleven, his family sought a better life and emigrated to Germany. But Mandelbrot was Jewish, and they arrived just as the Nazis were coming to power. So off they went again, nearly penniless this time, trekking by foot across two countries, and winding up in the French town of Tulle. They went for the simple reason that a friend was willing to help them settle. This friend was a rabbi, and a teacher, and during the war years he helped spark Mandelbrot’s love of math.”
The memories were fired by the light in Elena’s gaze. The hunger so similar to his own early years, how he found refuge in studying about a man who had endured far worse than himself. And triumphed. “Mandelbrot rose from nothing to become the head of IBM Computers.”
“For real?”
“Not just that, but he served as professor first at Harvard and then Yale. And he held honorary positions in France’s top scientific institute.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“He invented the termfractal. Have you ever heard of that?”
The young girl frowned. “Somewhere.”
“Mandelbrot had his time of fame back before I was born. And for math geeks it was the wrong kind of fame. His concepts got taken up by the yoga crowd.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I called them. Latter-day hippies, though by then the term had gone out of fashion.”
“Okay, now you’ve totally lost me.”
“Doesn’t matter. What’s important is, the math geeks took his work, basically stole the core concepts, worked on it, added their names to the process, then moved on.”
She waited a long moment, then asked what Dillon had hoped to hear. “So how does this help me?”
“Because this guy’s work, what he discovered, it’severywhere.The Mandelbrot set is used in weather patterning. Hydrology. Neurology. Linguistics. Software design. Computer graphics. On and on.” Dillon tapped the screen. “But the core concept, what drove all this, has basically been sidelined. No one is looking at the pure math that underlies all this. The math geeks—”
“Why do you call them that?”
Dillon acknowledged the question with a nod. “Jealousy, mostly. I wish I had their ability.Yourability. I don’t. I’m just an accountant.”
Bailey spoke for the first time. “There is nojust.”
“It’s true.”
“Don’t downplay your own gifts,” Bailey said. “Mayor’s orders.”
Elena said, “She gets like that sometimes.”
“Anyway, the people looking at Mandelbrot’s work nowadays are engineers. Technicians. Theyapply. But the sheer potential, what else might be uncovered from the basic structure, that’s lost to the history books. Toward the end of his life, Mandelbrot talked and wrote about how we had only touched the surface of what could be discovered.” He pointed to the darkened screen. “Mandelbrot’s formula showed how visual complexity can be created from very simple rules. Okay, simple for people like you. Things that we class as chaotic or messy, such as clouds or shorelines or financial markets or even the structure of leaves, actually have a very defined sense of order. If only we look at them the right way.”
Dillon drew up the first pattern. “This is an online sample of a Mandelbrot set.”
Bailey settled on the couch next to her daughter. “Scooch over.”
Elena pressed herself in tight next to Dillon. “That is so totally awesome.”
“This is nothing. Watch.” Dillon selected an edge of the design, and magnified. “No matter how much you zoom in on any point in the structure, you get smaller and smaller patterns of the exact same design. Mandelbrot called this concept fractal geometry, and to his dying breath insisted it was the core element that defined all of nature.”
He felt Elena release the tension in her body, take a long slow breath, and announce, “This could definitely work.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
Bailey said, “And now is the time when you saythank you.”
Elena nodded slowly. “Chills.”
Dillon smiled over the child’s head, loving how close he felt to her mother. “You’re welcome.”
