30 October 2008

Mandelbrot, Knuth, and open-ended citations

A citation reproduced verbatim from Benoit Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983):
Knuth, D. 1968-. The art of computer programming. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

The "1968-" is not Knuth's birth date, of course, but the date at which he started writing the work in question, which was fifteen years in the making when Mandelbrot wrote. It's still not done.

Incidentally, Mandelbrot's book is a good one, full of pretty pictures (although of course not as intricate as one might see now, because the book is a quarter-century old); it's also fairly casually written. Mandelbrot describes it as an "essay", in what I take to be the original Francophone sense of the word that means roughly an "attempt" at something, and so it's rather discursive, personal, and nonrigorous; these idiosyncrasies are good for a book one wants to read casually, as I do right now, but someone who wanted a rigorous understanding of the concepts might look elsewhere. I'm tempted to say it's a good series of lectures crystallized into paper form, although as far as I know it was never intended as such.

I think I'd heard of the book before, but it was Nova's Hunting the Hidden Dimension (aired on Tuesday night) that got me to actually head to the library and find it. I suspect I'm not alone, because apparently it's selling quite well on Amazon.

(The usual disclaimer on books I'm reading that I borrowed from the library applies: ignore my recommendations if you're at Penn, because I have the library's copy.)

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