The AMS Notices has an article this month with personal recollections about Mandelbrot; mathematical recollections will be saved for another article. He comes across as deeply curious and knowledgeable about almost every subject imaginable.

He was sometimes known for being “strangely vain”, but it is hard to not have the impression that this was the defense mechanism of someone who worked in solitude and obscurity for so many years before his ideas were finally recognized as important.

Mandelbrot gave the closing address of the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians. He congratulated Werner on his Fields Medal, and suggested that this was the third time a mathematician had won a Fields Medal for proving one of his conjectures.

Yoccoz won a Fields Medal, I believe in part for proving a big piece of the conjecture that the Mandelbrot set is locally connected. Apparently the full conjecture is still open. I don’t know enough about the subject to know if this was something that Mandelbrot originally conjectured though.

Also I wonder who he had in mind as the third Fields Medalist? Does anyone know?

A poetic quote from the article, by Michael Frame:

Years ago, when asked if he was a mathematician, a physicist, or an economist, Benoît replied that he was a storyteller. After Benoît died, I saw another interpretation of his answer. By emphasizing how an object grows, a fractal description of the object is a story. Twists and turns of a snowflake in a cloud, rough waves sculpting a jagged coastline, my lungs growing before I was born, the spread of galaxies throughout the deep dark of space. These share something? Benoît told us they have similar stories. Benoît told us science should tell more stories.

Hungarian mathematician Endre Szemerédi has been awarded the Abel Prize.

Here is a nice interview with him, translated to English by Zsuzsanna Dancso. (Original in Hungarian here.)

I think Szemerédi’s sense of humor comes across well in the interview.

Interviewer: In 2008, when you were awarded the Rolf Shock prize, you commented that in your opinion the Fields medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Abel Prize were the three most prestigious prizes in mathematics. Did you expect to get one of these back then?

Szemerédi: I would like to modify my opinion — now I only regard the Fields medal and the Wolf prize as the most prestigious.

Thanks to Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson for pointing me to the online preview of mathematical art which will be shown at the Joint Mathematical Meetings in January 2012.

Note in particular Mikael’s fantastic laser-etched Hyperbolic Coasters.

I also really like these by Vladimir Bulatov.

Jialan Wang, an assistant professor of finance at Washington University, has posted a fascinating note about the observable departure from Benford’s law over time. I am trying to imagine any other explanation of this other than widespread fraud (or as she puts it more tactfully, “decreased reliability of accounting data).

Please chime in with your own alternate explanations in the comments.

Here is a nice review by Randy Kamein of some recent work with Carlsson, Gorham, and Mason at the Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics.