Ian Stewart pays tribute to Benoît Mandelbrot, who discovered a formula to explain the beauty of the world around us .

from telegraph.co.uk:
'Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” With these words pioneering man of ideas Benoît Mandelbrot, who died last week at the age of 85, launched a scientific manifesto — a new field of mathematics, a new way to think about the natural world and a host of reasons why both were needed.

Once your minds’ eye is sensitive to fractal geometry, you see it everywhere. Ferns, grasses, the craters on the Moon, the fluctuations of the stock market, the incidence of large and small floods, the movements of rock deep in the Earth that cause earthquakes, even abstract art.