Udo of

Aachen Aachen ( ; ; Aachen dialect: ''Oche'' ; French and traditional English: Aix-la-Chapelle; or ''Aquisgranum''; nl, Aken ; Polish: Akwizgran) is, with around 249,000 inhabitants, the 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the 28th- ...

(c.1200–1270) is a fictional

monk A monk (, from el, μοναχός, ''monachos'', "single, solitary" via Latin ) is a person who practices religious asceticism by monastic living, either alone or with any number of other monks. A monk may be a person who decides to dedica ...

, a creation of British technical writer Ray Girvan, who introduced him in an April Fool's hoax article in 1999. According to the article, Udo was an illustrator and theologian who discovered the Mandelbrot set some 700 years before

Benoit Mandelbrot Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of phy ...

. Additional details of the hoax include the rediscovery of Udo's works by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

mathematician, who supposedly saw a picture of the Mandelbrot set in an illumination (manuscript), illumination for a 13th-century Carol (music), carol. Girvan also attributed Udo as a mystic and poet whose poetry was set to music by Carl Orff with the haunting ''O Fortuna (Orff), O Fortuna'' in Carmina Burana (Orff), Carmina Burana.

Aspects of the hoax

The poetry of ''O Fortuna'' was actually the work of itinerant goliards, found in the German Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern Abbey. The hoax was lent an air of credibility because often medieval monks did discover scientific and mathematical theories, only to have them hidden or shelved due to persecution or simply ignored because publication prior to the invention of the printing press was difficult at best. Mr. Girvan adds to this suggestion by associating Udo with several other more legitimate discoveries where an author was considered ahead of his time in terms of a scientific theory of some sort that is now established as a mainstream theory but was considered fringe science at the time. Another aspect of the deception was that it was very common for pre-20th century mathematicians to spend incredible amounts of time on hand calculations such as a logarithm table or trigonometric functions. Calculating all of the points for a Mandelbrot set is a comparable activity that would seem tedious today but would be routine for people of the time.

References

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External links

* * *{{cite web , author = John Armstrong , title = Hoax! , url = http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/hoax/ , publisher = The Unapologetic Mathematician , date = March 2008 , url-status = dead , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080402234353/http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/hoax/ , archive-date = 2008-04-02 Nonexistent people used in hoaxes Fictional Christian monks Fictional mathematicians April Fools' Day jokes Fractals 1999 hoaxes