5 ms·
The Mandelbrot Monk (1999)
- andy_wrote 9y agoFun story! But look at the date at the bottom...
- tylershuster 9y agoAgreed: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwifs/mathnews/Nzms82/news82.htm#monk http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwifs/mathnews/Nzms82/news82.htm#mo...
- ben_w 9y agoI was chatting about this with a friend recently. I spent most the last 15 years thinking it was real.
- CPAhem 9y agoIt reminds me of "An ancient rope-and-pulley computer is unearthed in the jungle of Apraphul," Computer Recreations, Scientific American http://robert.surton.net/cs271/apraphulian.pdf http://robert.surton.net/cs271/apraphulian.pdf
- hprotagonist 9y agogot me. those plurality-of-worlds Lorites sure do get around.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lukas 9y agoThis is clearly not a true story. I think someone should flag it or put a warning in the title.
- masswerk 9y agoNotably, 1999 is also the year which saw the beginning of intensified studies on the Archimedes Palimpsest[1]. Some inspiration may have been drawn from this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
- DougHaber 9y agoAccording to Wikipedia: Udo of Aachen (c.1200–1270) is a fictional monk, a creation of British technical writer Ray Girvan, who introduced him in an April Fool's hoax article in 1999. According to the article, Udo was an illustrator and theologian who discovered the Mandelbrot set some 700 years before Benoît Mandelbrot. Additional details of the hoax include the rediscovery of Udo's works by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a Harvard mathematician, who supposedly saw a picture of the Mandelbrot set in an illumination for a 13th-century carol. Girvan also attributed Udo as a mystic and poet whose poetry was set to music by Carl Orff with the haunting O Fortuna in Carmina Burana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen
- krylon 9y agoI have to admit I am a little sad this was an April fools joke. It would have been so cool if some obscure medieval monk had discovered the Mandelbrot set centuries ago. Then again, IIRC, complex numbers were not invented (discovered?) until the 1500s, so good old Udo would have had a hard time figuring out the math.
- donquichotte 9y agoHe "did" invent complex numbers! From TFA: "Initially, Udo's aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person's soul was composed of independent parts he called "profanus" (profane) and "animi" (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic, the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary numbers of modern mathematics."
- krylon 9y agoServes me right for not reading the "article" thoroughly. ;-)
- benjohnson 9y agoWhile this is a fun hoax, there is an 13th century illuminated manuscript that does get the imagination going: https://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/articles/frontispiece-of-a-bible-moralisee-ca-1250/ https://pavlopoulos.wordpress.com/articles/frontispiece-of-a...
- still_grokking 9y agoReading the headline I first thought it is about "Buddhabrot". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot