Benoit Mandelbrot
(born 1924, Warsaw, Poland)

French mathematician who created a new post-Euclidean discipline in geometry. Mandelbrot's theory of the fractional dimension or 'fractal' enables self-similarity across scale to be exhibited in various phenomena -- air turbulence, coastlines, stock market fluctuations. He developed computer graphics packages at IBM in order to demonstrate the concept that chaotic systems are generated by simple and infinitely repeated rules.