Exhibiting the process of science: ‘The islands of benoît mandelbrot: Fractals, chaos, and the materiality of thinking’

Abstract

Focusing primarily on the work of one of the most notable mathematicians of the twentieth century, the exhibition The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking, explores the role of images in scientific thinking in the aftermath of a historic media shift-the new, image based society created by the digital revolution. Here, the images produced by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot can be seen as icons of two of the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the last century: chaos theory and fractal geometry. This paper presents the general idea behind the exhibition and summarizes the main arguments.