It looks like main stream media are slowly understanding Mandelbrot’s work and they are speaking about it. I found yesterday an excellent article in one of the main French financial newspapers about Mandelbrot’s work on finance. The second good news, contained in that article, is that Mandelbrot’s book are being republished. A third good news, is that the author of the previous article, Philippe Herlin is very proactive and has just created a Facebook group called “Finance & Mandelbrot”. I joined immediately ! An instant interest of this group is that Philippe Herlin gives a list of news articles about the subject (given below). Please notice the link called How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street which is dated on February 1999. Yep, it is not a typo for 2009 !
Last but not least, there is a significant political news. Mandelbrot showed that the financial system was fractal, exhibiting the same behaviour at all scales. Actually that was the start of his long and brilliant career. Later on he showed the same behaviour for climate, geology, ecology, or biology. Actually about any natural system is fractal and even chaotical. However, there is a good way to smooth the behaviour of a system, it is called control. Our world needs more control (distributed control whenever possible). That is to say, more rules, more ways to enforce them and more ways to measure their efficiency. So the good news is today European leaders backed sweeping new regulations for financial markets. Questions remain, will the rules be good and will they be enforced?

By the way, if you want to understand a little better the whole world, if you want to hear about economy, climate, geology, ecology, or biology in less than 200 pages, just read these two amazing books. Your vision of the world will change and for almost free because these books are quite old (but have never been so fashionnable).

• Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, by Benoît Mandelbrot; W H Freeman and Co, 1977
• Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick (You will learn here the link between fractals and chaos. In two words: fractals can be seen as the domain of convergence of a dynamical system)

Nostalgia: I was offered these books 13 years ago. I read them then. They are definitely among the best gifts I have ever received. They stand in my bookshelf, one arm away from where I am writing these lines. Believe me these books are far easier to read than the Bible so you can give them to your children. I read them again 2 years ago after completing my studies in Dynamical Systems and Controls. I understood plenty of things I had missed in the first reading. So you can also offer these books to adults. They will learn quite a few things about the nature of our world.

Resources

In English

• Now is the time for a revolution in economic thought, Anatole Kaletsky, Times 9 February 2009
• In Plato’s cave, The Economist, 22 January 2009 (a very interesting article which mentions Mandelbrot)
• The Risk Maverick, video with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoît Mandelbrot, 21 October 2008 and an excellent summary of this video
• A focus on the exceptions that prove the rule, Benoît Mandelbrot & Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Financial Times, 23 March 2006
• How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street, Benoît Mandelbrot, Scientific American, February 1999
• Mandelbrot’s publications on finance
• Benoit Mandelbrot, bio in english
• The Fractal Geometry of Nature, by Benoît Mandelbrot; W H Freeman & Co, 1982
• Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, by Benoît Mandelbrot; W H Freeman and Co, 1977
• Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick

In French

• Redécouvrir Mandelbrot, Philippe Herlin, La Tribune 5 février 2009
• Les fondements erronés de la finance, Philippe Herlin, Les Echos, 5 Janvier 2009
• Philippe Herlin
• Benoît Mandelbrot, bio en français

If you know other good links about fractal, chaos theory and economy, please leave them in the comments.