Benoît B. Mandelbrot

D Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Prions - the particles that would emerge as the cause of Mad Cow disease - while working with a cannibal tribe on New Guinea. He was a star of the scientific world. Over his years working amongst the tribes of the South Seas, he adopted 57 kids, bringing them to a new life in Washington DC. His adoptions were hailed as wonderful fatherly beneficence. But, at the height of his career, rumours began to spread he was a paedophile. Gajdusek would argue that if sex with children was okay in their own cultures, he wasn't wrong to join in. How could a great mind like Gajdusek's lose insight so totally, and why would the scientific community to which he was a hero be so quick to leap to his defence and dismiss the allegations? (Storyville)

Until recently geometry was 'cold', incapable of describing the irregular shape of a cloud, the slope of a mountain or the beauty of the human body. With fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot gave us a language for our natural world. In this captivating documentary, the man himself explains this groundbreaking discovery.

Explores the revolutionary world of Fractal Geometry - its far-reaching and often unexpected implications - its powerful and revolutionary applications.

Fractal geometry is perhaps the most exciting discovery of contemporary mathematics. FRACTALS: AN ANIMATED DISCUSSION is a rare combination of full-color animated sequences and intriguing interviews. The film turns the Mandelbrot set and the Lorenz attractor into visible and easily comprehensible objects as their discoverers, Benoit Mandelbrot and Edward Lorenz, discuss the background history history and details of their work. The film features spectacular new computer-graphic illustrations of chaos and self-similarity as well as music composed according to fractal principles.