Apfelmännchen

Andrew sent me a link to Benoit Mandelbrot's obituary in the NY Times. Mandelbrot connected art to mathematics in a way no one had done before by discovering fractals, self-similar pictures that "look the same" when blown-up to a larger scale. This is just one of many examples of recursion, an idea that both mathematicians and computer scientists share and communally love. (Here's a written summary of the term and a visual one.) His most famous fractal, the Mandelbrot Set, attained immortality through its presence on thousands of T-shirts.

That same day I discovered that my office-mate had posted an obituary from a leading German newspaper. While it expressed the same warmth toward this iconoclastic genius as did the NY Times article, there were distinct cultural differences. One was simply the name for his most famous creation. The Germans call it Apfelmännchen or Little-Apple-Man.

This was not the first time I had been charmed by picturesque language used by Germans. In 2001 we visited Berlin and saw the remains of a bombed-out church, the Gedächtniskirche (Remembrance Church),which still stands as a reminder of the horrors of war. Berliners call it "the hollow tooth."

Apfelmännchen. Little-Apple-Man. Schön.