As Matt Blum of Wired.com's GeekDad reported eloquently this weekend, Yale mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot passed away on Friday at the age of 85. As evidenced by that story's headline ("He Gave Us Order Out of Chaos"), it was rare to see a mention of this news without connection to geek rock raconteur Jonathan Coulton's song "Mandelbrot Set," which gave fractal geometry its catchiest background ever. I talked to Coulton about how the song and the math god became perpetually intertwined.
Wired.com: When Mandelbrot died, the news spread through the internet in two forms: first, as links to The New York Times' obituary and similar stories, and second, as quotations and video clips of "Mandelbrot Set." Did you expect that, and how did it make you feel?
__Coulton: __I feel a little strange every time someone quotes the song line "Mandlebrot's in heaven." That's the obvious line to quote, but I feel bad that I was so glib about his future demise and now here it has actually happened. Though, of course, I'm honored to be connected to one of the ways that people can remember and understand him and his work. It's very meaningful to be linked in some small way to this big important thing.
__Wired.com: __I expect that Mandelbrot knew of the song. Did he ever convey how he felt about being a geek-rock icon?
__Coulton: __He did know of the song, and I think he liked it well enough. In the Big Think interview, he talks about it as one small piece of the very large and weird structure of his life, career and legacy, which is very flattering to me. I never met him, and I'm not sure we would have been able to have much of a real discussion about either mathematics or songwriting, but it's nice to know my song made it back to him.
__Wired.com: __What inspired you to write a song about math?
__Coulton: __I wrote that song for a Little Gray Books Lecture (a monthly reading series hosted by John Hodgman many years ago) on the theme of things named after people. I discovered Mandelbrot in high school and had always loved the weirdness of the Mandelbrot set, and it seemed like a good choice. When I started writing it I mostly wanted it to be a jokey song, the joke being "Ha ha, it's a heartfelt song about mathematics." But as I wrote it I realized that it actually was a heartfelt song about mathematics, and that I really did have a kind of emotional connection with thinking about fractals.
__Wired.com: __There's really no delicate way to put this -- how much do you understand the math in it? Because, y'know, I'm guessing the world thinks you could teach a class in fractal geometry.
__Coulton: __I don't really understand it all that well. In fact I got the description of it a little wrong, or perhaps more charitably, my description of it is incomplete. People call me on that all the time, and it's a little embarrassing. Please don't ask me to teach a class.
__Wired.com: __Let me pretend I have any idea what the problem is: The lyric is, "Take a point called Z in the complex plane. Let Z1 be Z squared plus C, and Z2 is Z1 squared plus C, and Z3 is Z2 squared plus C, and so on. If the series of Zs should always stay close to Z and never trend away, that point is in the Mandelbrot set." But that describes a Julia set instead? I take it it's "correct" as "Take a point called C in the complex plane. Let Z1 be zero squared plus C, and Z2 be Z1 squared plus C, and so on…"?
__Coulton: __Correct. Another way of looking at it is that I never say what C is. Either way: EPIC FAIL.
__Wired.com: __A Rock Band-playing friend asked me, now that Mandelbrot's in heaven, whether he should sing alternate lyrics to the line "at least he will be when he's dead." (I suggested, "But as far as I'm concerned.") Will you be singing the song any differently now?
__Coulton: __A lot of people have been asking, and I don't think I'm going to change the lyrics. They're factually incorrect now, but then so is my description of the M-Set and I never fixed that either. Mostly I think of it as a snapshot of the time when he was alive -- it's just how the song goes, that's all.
__Wired.com: __One thing I loved about Mandelbrot is that he gave himself a middle initial -- it's "Benoît B. Mandelbrot" -- which he said doesn't stand for anything. But it has to stand for something, right? My guess is the recursive "Benoît B. Mandelbrot." Theories?
__Coulton: __I can't think of anything better! Of course it stands for "Benoît B. Mandelbrot" and so as you zoom into his name closer and closer, you see the same structure repeating itself on different scales. His name has fractal geometry. If that wasn't his reasoning, I'll bet he wished it was.
Mike Selinker is a game and puzzle designer who heads the Seattle-area studio Lone Shark Games. He also writes a blog about non-puzzly stuff called The Most Beautiful Things, which this week happens to be about "Mandelbrot Set," as well.
