Fractal Developer Wins Wolf Prize, Science Historian is Elected to Congress, Robert W. Holley - Obituary

Fractal Developer Wins Wolf Prize Science Historian Is Elected To Congress Robert W. Holley - Obituary Benoit B. Mandelbrot, a fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., will be awarded the 1993 Wolf Prize in Physics by the Israeli-based Wolf Foundation on May 16. Since 1978, the Wolf Foundation has been granting $100,000 prizes for individual achievements in agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. This year, the prizes will be presented by Israeli President Chaim Herzog at the Knesset building in Jerusalem. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Mandelbrot, 68, is being honored for showing how fractals can have practical applications in many disciplines. He is the author of The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1982). Fractals--geometric objects of a complex nature composed of simple, invariant geometric patterns--have been found useful to researchers in the diverse fields of astronomy, computer science, biology, economics, geography, and physics. "I never liked mathematics by itself. I didn't like its dryness or abstraction," Mandelbrot says. "So I spent all my life being a mathematician without being a member of the core mathematics community. I've always done things my own way, which is why all my work has been used by many different disciplines." In addition to gaining satisfaction from the cross-disciplinary utility of his work, Mandelbrot says, he is extremely pleased that fractals are easily understood by high school and college teachers. "To my surprise and delight, young people and adolescents in the United States, France, England, and Australia have shown an extraordinary affinity to these ideas at an early age," he says. High school teachers are able to use fractals to motivate students to study mathematics, he notes. Mandelbrot received his Ph.D. in mathematical sciences from the Faculte des Sciences de Paris in 1952. He has been at IBM since 1958, starting as a research staff member. In 1974, he became a fellow at the research center. Since 1987, he has also served as a professor of mathematical sciences at Yale University. Of the 124 freshmen members of the 103rd Congress, Rep. Robert E. Filner (D-Calif.), a former professor of the history of science at San Diego State University, says he is entering national public office with a unique perspective. "Coming from a background as a historian with some knowledge of science, I think I come at the political process in a much broader and more analytical way," says Filner, who represents California's 50th District in San Diego. "Certainly, almost every major policy area involves scientific information. Most congresspeople don't have scientific backgrounds, so I oftentimes will have to figure out how to put science information into a form or style they can understand without diluting or oversimplifying it." Filner won 57 percent of the popular vote in the November general election, easily beating his Republican opponent, Tony Valencia. Filner says he has chosen to serve on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee and the Veterans' Affairs Committee, largely because of the importance these committees have to his San Diego constituency. He says his personal interests lie in the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, but he believes that freshman representatives should take care of their districts' needs first. Since 1970, Filner, 50, has taught survey courses in the history of science and science policy at San Diego State University. He received his B.A. in chemistry (1963) and his Ph.D. in the history of science (1970) from Cornell University. He says that even though education is his "first and true love," if the voters agree, he would like to stay in politics for a while. "However," he points out, "the political life is very uncertain. They don't give you tenure here." Robert W. Holley, a biologist and Nobel laureate, died February 11 in Los Gatos, Calif. He was 71. Holley, along with Marshall W. Rirenberg and H. Gobind Khorana, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1968 for deciphering the genetic code for RNA. His classic paper on the subject appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1965 ("Sequences in yeast alanine transfer ribonucleic acid," 240:2122). Holley did his RNA work at Cornell University, where he taught organic chemistry at the school's agricultural station at Geneva, N.Y., from 1948 to 1958. He was a researcher at the United States Department of Agriculture's Plant, Soil, and Nutrition Laboratory at Cornell in 1958-62. Holley then taught biochemistry and molecular biology at Cornell until 1966. He was a fellow and a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., from 1966 until his death. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Cornell in 1947.

Fractal Developer Wins Wolf Prize, Science Historian is Elected to Congress, Robert W. Holley - Obituary

Mar 21, 1993

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