Abstract
Focusing primarily on the work of one of the most notable mathematicians of the twentieth century, the exhibition The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking, explores the role of images in scientific thinking in the aftermath of a historic media shift—the new, image based society created by the digital revolution. Here, the images produced by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot can be seen as icons of two of the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the last century: chaos theory and fractal geometry. This paper presents the general idea behind the exhibition and summarizes the main arguments.
I was struck . . . by the way in which many aspects of laboratory practice
could be ordered by looking not at the scientist’s brain (I was forbidden access!),
at the cognitive structures (nothing special),
nor at the paradigms (the same for thirty years),
but at the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper.
(Latour [6], p. 21)
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Notes
- 1.
The article is largely based on curatorial texts developed for the exhibition, as well as on excerpts of [20]. The exhibition was on view at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City from September 21, 2012 to January 27, 2013, and subsequently from November 16, 2013 to March 30, 2014 at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
- 2.
Letter from Benoît Mandelbrot to John H. Hubbard, December 8, 1978.
- 3.
Interview of the author with John H. Hubbard, February 10, 2005.
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Samuel, N. (2015). Exhibiting the Process of Science: ‘The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking’. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01231-5_11
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