Benoit Mandelbrot
Mathematician and fractal geometry pioneer
Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician who coined the word "fractal" and is recognized for his work in fractal geometry.
1 summary 21 min of listening
Born 1924 in Warsaw, Poland Died 2010
About Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 to 2010) was born in Warsaw and moved with his family to France at the age of 11. He studied mathematics at universities in Paris and the United States, and he took an aeronautics master's at the California Institute of Technology. He held both French and American citizenship. He worked at IBM for 35 years from 1958 and became an IBM Fellow. Because the company gave him computer access, he was among the first to use computer graphics to display fractal images, which led to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set. He later became Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University. His research touched many fields, including economics, and he received numerous awards, among them the 2003 Japan Prize. His book in our catalog is The Misbehavior of Markets. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, appeared after his death, in 2012.