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When I taught journalism I would ask my writing class students to write obituaries, something these mostly-under-30 students found strange and difficult. A good obituary is not easy to write. It requires serious research into the field in which the dead person excelled, as well as fact-checking to get family and childhood information correct. You often can’t rely on current celebrity status to keep readers interested, so the writing itself must be very good.

Several of my favourites over the years have been published by the Economist, which has just published an obituary for “Benoît Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry”. You don’t have to like or be interested in mathematics to love this elegant piece of writing, a fine tribute to an interesting man and his work. Do read to the end, especially if you wonder why more people didn’t see the global economic crisis coming.

“What is the length of a country’s coastline? Any encyclopedia will give you a figure. Yet stand by the sea and watch the irregularity of its edge, and you begin to doubt. It is not just a matter of tide and waves,” writes the Economist‘s unnamed author. Mandelbrot wrote a famous essay after asking himself this question, eight years before he invented the word fractals to describe his discoveries.

The obituary is a fine reminder of what mathematics is, and isn’t, for those of us who too easily take it for granted.

Related blog: “What’s in your armentarium”, The Fine Line

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