Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

One final note: Mandelbrot showed surprisingly little interest in understanding the mechanistic origins of fractals. Having revealed to the world their extraordinary universality, his passion remained more with their mathematical description than with their physical origins. His attitude seemed to be that they were a fascinating property of nature and we should delight in their ubiquity, simplicity, complexity, and beauty. We should develop a mathematics to describe and use them, but we should not be too concerned about the underlying principles for how they are generated. In a word, he approached them more as a mathematician than as a physicist. This may have been one of the reasons that his great discovery did not receive quite the appreciation in the physics community and scientific establishment that it perhaps deserved and, as a result, he did not receive the Nobel Prize, despite broad recognition in many quarters and a litany of prestigious awards and prizes.