Editing Udo of Aachen (section)

{{Short description|Fictional monk from a 1999 hoax}}
{{nofootnotes|date=June 2020}}
'''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 [[Benoit Mandelbrot]].

Udo's works were allegedly discovered by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a [[Harvard University|Harvard]] 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]]. Later Schipke uncovered Udo's work which described how Udo had come to this kind of design while working on a method of determining whether one's soul would reach heaven.