The Life and Accomplishments of Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot
Benoit Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 20th, 1924 to a Lithuanian-Jewish family. Correctly sensing the geo-political turmoil forming, his family moved to France in 1936, when Benoit was 11. His uncle Szolem Mandelbrot, who succeeded Hadamard as Professor of Mathematics at the Collège de France and a member of the elite “Bourbaki”, took responsibility for Benoit’s education. It was his uncle who in 1945 introduced him to Gaston Maurice Julia's 1918 masterpiece, "Mémoire sur l'itération des fonctions rationnelles", a 199 page treatise in which Julia, then 25 years old, described the set J(f) of those z in C for which the nth iterate f(z) stays bounded as n tends to infinity. Mandelbrot, however, disliked it, and it disregarded the work for some thirty years, until working with his own theories, he found his attention drawn to Julia's paper again. As a child, Mandelbrot attended the Lycée Rolin in Paris until the start of World War II, w...