# Glimpses of Benoît B. Mandelbrot

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.

# Abel prize for Szemerédi

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.

# Is Benford’s law really less true now than ever?

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).

# Analyzing card shuffling machines

Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes have uploaded a preprint titled, “Analysis of Casino Shelf Shuffling Machines.” The paper provides a brief overview of the venerable history of mixing time of card shuffling, all the way back to early results by Markov and Poincaré, and their main point is to analyze a model of shuffle that had not been studied previously. What I found most interesting, though, was their account of successfully convincing people in the business of making card shuffling machines that their machines weren’t adequately mixing up the cards. They gave the manufacturers one mathematical argument, based on total variation distance, that they didn’t accept, and then another argument, based on a card guessing game, that they did.

I’ll describe the card guessing game. I flip through a deck of 52 cards, one card at a time, and before I flip a card you try to guess what it will be. Let’s say you have a perfect memory for every card that’s already been flipped, so you obviously won’t guess those. On the other hand, if the cards are in a truly random order to start out, you obviously don’t have any better strategy than to guess uniformly among the remaining cards. An easy analysis gives that your best possible expected number of correct guesses is ${1 \over 52} + {1 \over 51} + \dots + { 1 \over 1} \approx 4.5$. On the other hand, the authors described a strategy (conjectured to be best possible) that allows one to guess an average of $9.5$ cards correctly, on a totally ordered deck run through the shelf shuffling machine only once. This suggests strongly that the cards are not sufficiently random.

This analysis convinced the company to have the shelf shuffling machine make two passes through the deck, rather than one as they had initially hoped. The president of the company told them that “We are not pleased with your conclusions, but we believe them and that’s what we hired you for.”

# Mathematical Zen

In 1974 Frank Harary and Ronald C. Read published a paper with the incredible title, “Is the null-graph a pointless concept?