VizWorld.com

This Weekend, ORNL’s Phil Andrews passed away of a sudden and unexpected heart attack.  Phil Andrews worked at both UT and ORNL in the leadership of the NICS, including the NSF funded Kraken Supercomputer.

During his career at NICS, the supercomputing centers at San Diego and Pittsburgh and at GA Technologies in San Diego, he authored approximately 40 papers on grid and data intensive computing, documentation and visualization techniques, theoretical plasma physics and nonlinear dynamics. Andrews was involved in high performance computing for more than 30 years in management, software development and as a user. He had a doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University, an M.A. from Purdue University and a B.A. in applied mathematics from Cambridge University, England.

via UT and ORNL Communities Mourn the Passing of NICS Project Director | Tennessee Today.

Science hpc, obituary, ornl

The New York Times brings us the sad news that Benoit Mandelbrot, famous mathematician and creator of the ‘fractal’, passes away Thursday after a bout with pancreantic cancer.

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

I’m sure everyone in computer graphics has played with a Mandelbrot fractal generator.  RIP.

via Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

Science fractal, mandelbrot, obituary