RE: Benoît Mandelbrot, requiescat in pace ...

[Monte Davis]

In _The Eighth Day of Creation_, Horace Judson passes on an anecdote about
biochemist/geneticist Alfred Hershey (Nobel 1969). Asked what made him
happy, he said: "To come up with an experiment that works, and do it over
and over and over"...an interesting counterbalance to the idea that
scientists and mathematicians are all about the radically new. It was
resonant enough that the next generation in the field,  with a powerful new
set of DNA-based tools to apply to a zillion genomes, called such a
situation "Hershey's Heaven."

I knew Mandelbrot slightly in the 1970s and 1980s, and once told him about
Hershey's Heaven. He was enthusiastic in applying it to himself. As a
pure/research mathematician, he said, he'd had just one important idea in
fractal dimension ('s ok, most have none). But as an applied mathematician,
he'd had decades of Heaven: that one idea turned out to work over and over
and over -- to illuminate more disparate things than he could ever get
around to. 

RIP indeed.