Benoît B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician, noted for developing a "theory of roughness" in nature and the field of fractal geometry to help prove it, which included coining the word "fractal". He later discovered the Mandelbrot set of intricate, never-ending fractal shapes, named in his honor.
While he was a child, his family fled to France in 1936 to escape the growing Nazi persecution of Jews. After World War II ended in 1945, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and the U.S., re...