"Benoit Mandelbrot Breaks Wind"

Oil on Canvas 50"x30"

IN this remarkable and unrecognizable landscape, I have captured the father of the fractal in the act of breaking wind. Benoit Mandelbrot famously found what came to be known as the "Mandelbrot set", while researching his love of nature and the fact that in nature, nothing is smooth. So it should not come as any surprise, to art lover or mathematician alike, that the landscape of this genius's buttock is not smooth either, rather bristling with the complexity and geometry of his own mathematical miracle. Once you are fully entrenched in the world of fractal geometry, and how it is present in nature and in our lives, the next logical steps to recognizing these shapes. Reaching beyond fractals, lies particles, fluid and gas motion. In the painting "Benoit Mandelbrot Breaks Wind" the simple act of passing gas is examined to reveal the inherent beauty in such an act, its resulting gaseous cloud, traveling at escape velocity while maintaining shape, and all the surrounding geometry involved. Not only the skin of the landscape is fractal, but the act itself creates and the painting captures, all the fractal shrapnel in the glorious color of all early Mandelbrot sets, that landed on so many gaudy calendars over the years. Here the microscopic world is depicted macroscopic-ally, to for once and all bring to light the magic of such a simple act. 

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Benjeman Franklin famously wrote on the topic

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year...Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious Enquiry of learned Physicians, Chemists, &c. of this enlightened Age. It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind. That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

Previous renditions have not properly payed homage to the act.

• The word "fart" may be considered vulgar but it's actually derived from an Old English word "feortan," which means

  • "to break wind."

• On average, you'll pass about half a liter of gas a day.

• The Average adult will break air 14 times a day

• Farts have been clocked at speeds of up to 10 feet per second

• Flatulence is flammable

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• Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.

• Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

• Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

• Regular geometry, the geometry of Euclid, is concerned with shapes which are smooth, except perhaps for corners and lines, special lines which are singularities, but some shapes in nature are so complicated that they are equally complicated at the big scale and come closer and closer and they don't become any less complicated.

• A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

• Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

• One couldn't even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn't expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.

• Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

• Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

Benoit Mandelbrot Breaks WInd

Benoit Mandelbrot

The Famed Mandelbrot Set

With Painting in Studio, nearly finished

Benoit Mandelbrot Breaks WInd

Interesting facts about Breaking Wind

Quotes from Benoit Mandelbrot

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