Benoit Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot fled Warsaw with his family in 1936 at eleven, landed in France, and after the war studied mathematics in Paris and aeronautics at Caltech. In 1958 he joined IBM for what became a 35-year run, where access to early computers let him do what no one had before: render fractal images and discover the Mandelbrot set in 1979-1980. He called himself a "fractalist," chasing "the art of roughness" across cotton futures, shorelines, and a dozen other fields — statistical physics, hydrology, linguistics, chaos theory — proving that visual complexity springs from simple rules. He taught econom…