Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Fractals and Benoit Mandelbrot: Lessons for Society
Following the passing of Benoit Mandelbrot this week, Horace Campbell writes of the mathematician’s groundbreaking academic work on fractals and the concept’s historical centrality in African knowledge systems.It was announced this week that Benoit Mandelbrot passed away at the age of 85. One news source called him a ‘maverick’ mathematician. It was Mandelbrot who introduced the word ‘fractals’ to the Western world to capture an aspect of mathematics that had been resisted by the Western academy because of a worldview that would not deal with an ‘alien’ concept of uncertainty and the infinite complexity of nature. We want to use the news of his passing to bring to the fore the importance of fractals and fractal thinking in society... Read more
