Chaos - James Gleick [53]
To pure mathematicians, however, Mandelbrot remained an outsider, contending as bitterly as ever with the politics of science. At the height of his success, he was reviled by some colleagues, who thought he was unnaturally obsessed with his place in history. They said he hectored them about giving due credit. Unquestionably, in his years as a professional heretic he honed an appreciation for the tactics as well as the substance of scientific achievement. Sometimes when articles appeared using ideas from fractal geometry he would call or write the authors to complain that no reference was made to him or his book.
His admirers found his ego easy to forgive, considering the difficulties he had overcome in getting recognition for his work. “Of course, he is a bit of a megalomaniac, he has this incredible ego, but it’s beautiful stuff he does, so most people let him get away with it,” one said. In the words of another: “He had so many difficulties with his fellow mathematicians that simply in order to survive he had to develop this strategy of boosting his own ego. If he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t been so convinced that he had the right visions, then he would never have succeeded.”
The business of taking and giving credit can become obsessive in science. Mandelbrot did plenty of both. His book rings with the first person: I claim…I conceived and developed…and implemented…I have confirmed…I show…I coined…In my travels through newly opened or newly settled territory, 1 was often moved to exert the right of naming its landmarks.
Many scientists failed to appreciate this kind of style. Nor were they mollified that Mandelbrot was equally copious with his references to predecessors, some thoroughly obscure. (And all, as his detractors noted, quite safely deceased.) They thought it was just his way of trying to position himself squarely in the center, setting himself up like the Pope, casting his benedictions from one side of the field to the other. They fought back. Scientists could hardly avoid the word fractal, but if they wanted to avoid Mandelbrot’s name they could speak of fractional dimension as Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension. They also—particularly mathematicians—resented the way he moved in and out of different disciplines, making his claims and conjectures and leaving the real work of proving them to others.
It was a legitimate question. If one scientist announces that a thing is probably true, and another demonstrates it with rigor, which one has done more to advance science? Is the making of a conjecture an act of discovery? Or is it just a cold-blooded staking of a claim? Mathematicians have always faced such issues, but the debate became more intense as computers began to play their new role. Those who used computers to conduct experiments became more like laboratory scientists, playing by rules that allowed discovery without the usual theorem-proof, theorem-proof of the standard mathematics paper.
Mandelbrot’s book was wide-ranging and stuffed with the minutiae of mathematical history. Wherever chaos