Benoit Mandelbrot

I see that Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal geometry, turns eighty next week.

I was lucky enough to be part of the group at R/Greenberg Associates in New York that helped bring one of Mandelbrot's and Dr. Richard Voss's famous fractal terrains to popular attention by animating a fly-through of it in a 1987 IBM television commercial.
We didn't have a sky, but to keep everything 'fractal,' we interpreted the terrain height field mesh as an image of blue and white color values.

The commercial was popular, and went on to win a number of awards, including a Gold Plaque, Computer Graphics, Chicago International Film Festival; a Gold Award, International Film & TV Festival; a Certificate of Merit, Institutional/Corporate ID, Chicago International Film Festival; and a Gold Award, Computer Graphics, Houston International Film Festival.

Happy Birthday Dr. Mandelbrot.

UPDATE 4/27/2009

Jonathon Coulton sings a nice song about the Mandelbrot Set. My daughter particularly enjoys this fractal zoom set to his music.

UPDATE 7/29/2009
I just came across this - Vol Libre by (Pixar's Chief Scientist) Loren Carpenter, who describes his work as follows:

"I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each."

very cool.

UPDATE 11/13/2009

3D Mandelbub: Some very interesting lit and shaded 3D versions

and 3D Mandelbrot thread at Fractal Forums