The fractalist. Memoir of a scientific maverick. Transl. from the American by Helmut Reuter (Q2854963)

This is the autobiography of the creator of the theory of fractals, Polish-born Benoît Mandelbrot (1924--2010), who died shortly before the book appeared in 2012 as the American original. Because Mandelbrot's notions have stirred much public interest, not least in connection with computer imaging, the book is obviously meant for a broader non-scientific readership. It has now been translated into German as well, which is here under review. Mandelbrot has had a fascinating live. According to his own words he and his family have been saved from the Holocaust because in the 1930s they moved to his uncle Szolem Mandelbrojt, who had become an influential, more traditional mathematician in France in the 1920s. Benoît Mandelbrot's career as a scientist was much influenced by his uncle as well, albeit more in the sense of demarcation from the mainstream. Mandelbrot was even more opposed to the mathematical style of Bourbaki, which induced him not to choose a traditional career through the French ENS, to which school Mandelbrot was accepted after brilliant exams. The result was an erratic career, mostly in the United States, with shorter stays in academia and a longer one at IBM. Mandelbrot reached his first permanent academic position at Yale University at the age of 75. Mandelbrot has much interesting to report about personal encounters with luminaries such as John von Neumann and Robert J. Oppenheimer (who were supportive) or Otto Neugebauer and Willy Feller (who were skeptical). Mandelbrot's attack against Feller (p. 291) seems unwarranted. Less than it would have seemed necessary in a popular book, Mandelbrot talks about his work. Nowhere the notion of a fractal is explained, the most detailed are Mandelbrot's remarks about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law in linguistics. He repeatedly talks in a rather elusive way about his ``Keplerian dreams'' without even mentioning Kepler's work (1611) on the shape of snowflakes, an early precursor to fractals, while he alludes instead to Kepler's ellipses in astronomy. Mandelbrot wholeheartedly assumes and accepts his position as an outsider, even a maverick; this probably explains the tone of self-aggrandizement which runs through the book and is at times difficult to swallow. The German translation is frustrating. ``Inequalities'' are translated as ``Ungleichheiten'' and ``locally connected'' as ``lokal verbunden'' instead of ``zusammenhängend''. Where the original says ``zloty, a silver coin'' (eschewing the Polish letter ł), the translation rewords it as ``zloty, which means silver coin'', although the ``gold'' should be recognizable even in the Slavic word. Most unfortunate are many typos in names and, above all, the decision not to print the detailed index of the American original.