Benoit Mandelbrot

While the mathematician, born 96 years ago in Warsaw, may be obscure to the non-mathematically-minded, his discoveries are widely known.

The term fractal geometry, coined in 1975, describes the mathematical phenomena of irregular yet infinitely repeating shapes found throughout nature.

Think of snowflakes, ocean waves, DNA, crystals or pineapples.  

He also worked at IBM in New York. An early pioneer in using computers, he developed an algorithm that modelled landforms found in nature. It led to his breakthrough and the publishing of his famous 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

Mr. Mandelbrot was born to Lithuanian-Jewish parents and was a local chess champion captivated by mathematics and geometry thanks to his father's map collection.

Mr Mandelbrot won numerous awards for his work, including the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in 1993.

He passed away in 2010 aged 85.

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Breakout Year For Teams

Prior to 2020, Microsoft’s Teams collaboration app was already growing fast. But that was nothing compared to what has happened to Teams this year--when the app suddenly became a household name, and a part of people‘s daily lives, amid the shift to remote work and education. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it in April, the shift to remote has driven an “orders of magnitude increase” in usage of Teams--which is part of Office 365 and offers chat, video conferencing and audio calling. Yet while the number of daily active users of Teams has exploded, Microsoft is also “seeing increased usage intensity across the platform as people communicate, collaborate and co-author content in Teams,” Nadella said in July. Notably, the growth has led Microsoft to double down on development of the Teams platform while also making it increasingly profitable for partners to work with.

Breakout Year For Teams

Prior to 2020, Microsoft’s Teams collaboration app was already growing fast. But that was nothing compared to what has happened to Teams this year--when the app suddenly became a household name, and a part of people‘s daily lives, amid the shift to remote work and education. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it in April, the shift to remote has driven an “orders of magnitude increase” in usage of Teams--which is part of Office 365 and offers chat, video conferencing and audio calling. Yet while the number of daily active users of Teams has exploded, Microsoft is also “seeing increased usage intensity across the platform as people communicate, collaborate and co-author content in Teams,” Nadella said in July. Notably, the growth has led Microsoft to double down on development of the Teams platform while also making it increasingly profitable for partners to work with.

Peter Mayhew, Actor Behind Chewbacca’s Mask in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 74

Peter Mayhew, the British-born actor best known for portraying the gentle giant Chewbacca in the “Star Wars” movie franchise, died on Tuesday at his home in North Texas. He was 74.

His family confirmed the death in a statement on Thursday but did not specify where he died. In recent years he had lived in Boyd, in Wise County. A representative for Mr. Mayhew said he died after having a heart attack.

Mr. Mayhew, who was 7-foot-3, climbed into a shaggy costume to play Chewbacca, the menacing-seeming yet cuddly Wookiee who is Han Solo’s sidekick and co-pilot aboard the spaceship Millennium Falcon.

He appeared in all three films of the original “Star Wars” trilogy, as well as in the prequel “Revenge of the Sith” in 2005 and the sequel “The Force Awakens” in 2015.

Jerry Merryman, Co-Inventor of the Pocket Calculator, Dies at 86

Jerry Merryman, a self-taught electrical engineer who helped design the first pocket calculator, died on Feb. 27 in Dallas. He was 86.

His wife, Phyllis (Lee) Merryman, said the cause was heart and kidney failure. He had been hospitalized since late December for complications arising from surgery to install a pacemaker.

In 1965, two years after he joined the electronics maker Texas Instruments without a college degree, the company asked Mr. Merryman and two other engineers to build a calculator that could fit into a shirt pocket.

He designed the fundamental circuitry in less than three days, and when Texas Instruments unveiled the device two years later, the moment marked a transformational shift in the way Americans would handle everyday mathematics for the next four decades.

“Silly me, I thought we were just making a calculator, but we were creating an electronic revolution,” Mr. Merryman told the NPR program “All Things Considered” in 2013.

Paul Allen

Paul Allen and Bill Gates

On October 15, 2018, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen passed away due to complications from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He revealed earlier in October that he started treatment for the cancer, which he had also battled back in 2009. His sister, Jody, released an official statementregarding her brother's passing:

While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend. Paul’s family and friends were blessed to experience his wit, warmth, his generosity and deep concern. For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends. At this time of loss and grief for us – and so many others – we are profoundly grateful for the care and concern he demonstrated every day.

Ellie Mae Academy Certified Developer

Or Khiyaev and Walter David have successfully completed the requirements prescribed by Ellie Mae and therefore considered a CERTIFIED DEVELOPER.

CONGRATULATIONS

Douglas Rain, voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, dies aged 90

Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor best known as the voice of ship’s HAL 9000 computer in the Stanley Kubrick sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died aged 90. Rain died from natural causes in hospital in Ontario.

HAL was named after IBM (one letter shifted).

Despite HAL’s celebrated status, Rain was never cast in a feature film in a live acting role, however, he did agree to voice a HAL parody in the Woody Allen comedy Sleeper, in which he played a computer overseeing a complicated cloning procedure.

Blockchain Leading Network

Blockchain was publicized in 2009 when the Bitcoin network emerged, it is the original source code for Bitcoin. Though, in the last two years it has transpired into fintech’s leading source of information and provides companies with a way to track value and store factual data. Each block’s record cannot be altered without the alteration of all other blocks; its technology grounds new currencies, reducing fraud, and producing more opportunities for global markets. Financial services all over the world have invested in Blockchain, and Microsoft Azure offers Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology available on their site.