Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of the Fractal
Benoit Mandelbrot in 1982
Born in Warsaw, Mandelbrot and his family fled the Nazis to France. There, the young polymath began a life of study that would pass through many of the world's most prestigious academic institutions, including Caltech, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He spent most of his career working as a researcher at IBM, where he first encountered the problem that would lead to his most famous observation. In the 1960s, IBM scientists were baffled by the electronic "noise" that sometimes interfered with their transmissions, causing errors. Though it was noted that the blips occurred in clusters, nothing further could be discerned until Mandelbrot noticed that they formed a pattern and that the more closely they were examined, the more complex the pattern seemed to become.