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Nicholas Courtney has died at the age of 81, after a short illness.

He will be much missed - not only was he superb as Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart, but he was the honorary president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, a regular and charming participant at conventions, and by all reports a thoroughly good chap.

Video tribute below the cut: some of the Brig's many Crowning Moments of Awesome )
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Benoit Mandelbrot died on Thursday night of pancreatic cancer, aged 85.

Mandelbrot was one of the first people to use computer visualisations to explore mathematical objects, and the first to find a practical use for the idea of the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension, the idea that some objects could be thought of as having fractional dimension. Fractal geometry has had applications in all sorts of areas of applied mathematics, from earthquake data to population dynamics. Mandelbrot even applied his ideas to explaining the global financial crisis.

Mandelbrot kept on working and teaching right up until the end of his life. Here's his talk from TED this July:



He will be much missed.
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Satoshi Kon, director of Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent and Paprika died last Tuesday, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 46. He wrote one last rambling but extraordinary statement on his death, which his family posted posthumously on his blog, and which has been translated into English here.

We've just lost an incredibly talented artist, and the world will be poorer without him.

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