Mandelbrot monk
Fred points me to a lovely page about a 13th-century Benedictine monk whose attempt at mathematically modeling the journey of the human soul through life resulted in his discovery of the Mandelbrot Set, seven centuries before Mandelbrot:
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.
Unfortunately a theological disagreement between Udo and his helper, a monk named Thelonius, resulted in Udo's work never being completed.
Also of note from this article is a side comment about Poe:
[L]iterary critics dismissed Edgar Allan Poe's final work, Eureka, as alcoholic ravings. But now scientists are finding valid insights in it, such as Poe's correct solution of the Olbers paradox in astronomy, or his coining of the classic Einsteinian phrase, 'Space and duration are one'."
For more insight into this article, btw, be sure to look at the publication date given at the bottom of the article.
