While mathematicians and theoretical physicists disregarded Mandelbrot’s work, Scholz was precisely the kind of pragmatic, working scientist most ready to pick up the tools of fractal geometry. He had stumbled across Benoit Mandelbrot’s name in the 1960s, when Mandelbrot was working in economics and Scholz was an M.I.T. graduate student spending a great deal of time on a stubborn question about earthquakes.
