The Festival della Matematica started in 2007 in Rome and brought together the greatest thinkers and contributors to our knowledge of this century. Organized by the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi, the Festival della Matematica has brought to a larger audience the beauty and importance in society of this discipline, which was defined by Galileo Galilei as the language of the universe: " La filosofia e' scritta in questo grandissimo libro che continuamente ci sta aperto innanzi agli occhi (io dico l'universo)...Egli e' scritto in lingua matematica"
This year's edition bridges New York (March 10 and 11) and Rome (March 19-22), as two of the greatest centers of contemporary culture so different and complementary at the same time. The New York edition included lectures by the 1979 Physics Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glasgow, Benoît Mandelbrot father of fractal geometry, the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics John Nash, the mathematician Thomas Banchoff who brought computer visualization to multidimensional universes and the physicist Brian Greene who brought to larger audience's attention string theory in the book "The Elegant Universe".
Piergiorgio Odifreddi and Thomas Banchoff 
Benoit Mandelbrot