Udo of Aachen (c.1200–1270) is a fictional monk, 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 Benoît Mandelbrot.
Additional details of the hoax include the rediscovery of
Udo's works by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a Harvard
mathematician, who supposedly saw a picture of the
Mandelbrot set in an illumination for a 13th-century carol.
Girvan also attributed Udo as a mystic and poet whose
poetry was set to music by Carl Orff with the haunting O
Fortuna in Carmina Burana.
I have to admit I am a little sad this was an April fools joke. It would have been so cool if some obscure medieval monk had discovered the Mandelbrot set centuries ago.
Then again, IIRC, complex numbers were not invented (discovered?) until the 1500s, so good old Udo would have had a hard time figuring out the math.
"Initially, Udo's aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person's soul was composed of independent parts he called "profanus" (profane) and "animi" (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic, the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary numbers of modern mathematics."
Notably, 1999 is also the year which saw the beginning of intensified studies on the Archimedes Palimpsest[1]. Some inspiration may have been drawn from this.
