Au Revoir, Benoit/in /by

The novel on which I am currently working has elements that are inspired by fractal geometry and the work of Benoit Mandelbroit so I was sorry to hear that he passed away last week. I will not be able to eventually meet him now. While most people do not know the Mandelbrot name, they do know the image of the famous Mandelbrot set.

What I may like best about Dr. Mandelbrot is this as reported in the New York Times:

When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

It sounds as if he understood that his life was as poetic as his math.

The Underworld/in /by

Usually, I think of the underworld as a metaphorical place or psychological experience. It’s the trip through Dante’s Inferno or the descent of Persephone into Hades. It’s the dark night we all go through from time to time in the course of a life. Yet, every rare once in a while we witness something that completely embodies the experience such as the slow return from the underworld of the miners in Chile.



As the miner nicknamed Super Mario put it, “I met God. I met the Devil. God won.”

Bring the Pumpkins, Caramel Apples and Cider! Bring the Fanged Things and Dancing Spiders!/in /by

My new blog will be launching in time for Halloween.  But if you sneak around the site before then, you will find broken links and half-written things and things that do not make any sense.

The webmistress assumes no responsibility for any mental duress or insanity caused by these things.   She assumes you showed up that way.