Are You Sure (October 14)

Artist-Engineers prepare an interface to the famed artificial intelligence Benoit Mandelbrot. The blue fractal aura is a false-color representation of the underlying gray light effect. Gray light is emitted when an artificial intelligence of sufficient complexity interacts with organic sentient beings of compatible complexity.

Are You Sure ...

• ... that mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a pioneer of fractal geometry; that he coined the word "fractal"; and that he discovered the Mandelbrot set?

• ... that mathematician Abraham Fraenkel (17 February 1891 – 15 October 1965) contributed to set theory and foundational mathematics, that he published two papers which sought to improve Ernst Zermelo's axiomatic system; and that the result is Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory?

• ... that civil engineer and American intelligence officer Robert Furman (21 August 1915 – 14 October 2008) was the chief of foreign intelligence for the Manhattan Engineer District, directing espionage against the German nuclear energy project during the Second World War; that Furman participated in the Alsos Mission, which conducted a series of operations intended to place all uranium in Europe into Allied hands, and which, near the end of the war, rounded up German atomic scientists; that Furman personally escorted half of the uranium-235 necessary for the Little Boy atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian; and that he was a key figure overseeing the construction of The Pentagon building?

—October 14, 2020

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