Quanta Magazine dives into fractals: The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal. Good reading if you’ve got a hankering for more Benjamin Labatut — author Jordana Cepelewicz does a great job of making the case for why it’s interesting.
There’s a great video to lead it off:
…and it gets more interesting from there. Cepelewicz finds several interesting figures and digressions in the story, including Jeremy Kahn, who seemingly got whatever the math version of the yips is:
His research garnered attention, and in his third year of graduate school, he accepted a tenure-track job at the California Institute of Technology.
Everything seemed to be lining up perfectly.
And then he froze.
At Caltech, he couldn’t write…
In four years at Caltech, Kahn didn’t write a single paper. He lost his job.
It’s a great piece, and another example of where I think AI will change the world — very niche, contained settings and tasks that humans simply are unsuited to, and require more sophisticated judgement than a simple algorithm.