The Mandelbrot dies, 85

The Benoît B. Mandelbrot has passed away, at age 85, from cancer. From the Times: "[he] was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France, where he tended horses and fixed tools." Pretty tough dude, Litvak Shoah survivor, mathematical genius. Sigh, I'm now imagining the 6 million of people like him who were murdered (a terrible after-effect of my being a teaching assistant for a class on the Holocaust).

My brother knows his son. And, no, I don't think Benoit invented the paisley tie, let's not sully his name.

Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100

The newest winner of my Vance Packard Award - named for the journalist who died in 1996, many years after I thought he was already dead - is enormously influential anthropologist: Claude Levi-Strauss - who died at 100 years old. When I read his stuff in college, he'd long since been elevated into the Zodiac of "important thinkers in our history that we don't consider in any way correct anymore". It's amazing that he was still alive.

Note, he did not invent the jeans, but who knows, the time frame was right!