January 11, 2015

A FRENCHMAN NAMED BENOIT, KAI'S POWERTOOLS AND THE SECRET TO LIFE (INCLUDING BETTER iPHONE ANTENNAS)

If you've been around graphics as long as I have, you'll remember the desktop publishing revolution of the Eighties and Kai's PowerTools of the Nineties with the cool fractal stuff and Kai's lifelike interfaces that eventually made their way into OS X. What I didn't realize until now is that Mandelbrot was the name of a French mathematician named Benoit who came from France to IBM in America in the 70s and no one really knew about Fractals or understood them at the time. For some reason I always assumed fractals were DaVinci type math and it's amazing that the Mandelbrot Set was a creation of the 80s, a child of the computer revolution really. And even though fractal images have trended out just like Kai's PowerTools... the fractal designs and Kai's ideas are used everywhere now... including both the OS and the antenna of your latest iPhone. Talk about the intersection of Art and Math... and Life itself! But watch for yourself: