Father of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot, dies at 85

Not so long ago, I was in love with fractals on my IBM PS/2 with 386 cpu (1988) and a very cool (back then) graphics card. I remember that I have constantly played, changed one or two values of fractal set which changes the look of fractals by itself...gosh...it was fun.

Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, died on October 14 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85.
Mandelbrot fled Poland ahead of Nazi occupation when he was 11 and moved with his family to Paris. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique under the mathematicians Gaston Julia, whose Julia set is a function of complex dynamics closely affiliated with a set of fractals now called the Mandelbrot set, and Paul Pierre Levy, an expert in probability theory.

After World War II, Mandelbrot got a Masters degree in aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in mathematical sciences from the University of Paris; he did a stint at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University after that, where he was sponsored by none other than John von Neumann.
In 1958, after a few years in academia, Mandelbrot became a mathematician at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, a post he held for 32 years before retiring as an IBM Fellow and taking a teaching position at Yale University a decade ago.
Just as personal computers were going mainstream in the early 1980s, Mandelbrot put together his now famous book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which mainstreamed the idea of fractional dimensions and, more importantly, illustrated these fractals, as Mandelbrot called them, with hypnotic graphics.The Mandelbrot subset of the Julia set, seen herewith, is probably the most famous image in mathematics, akin to the most famous equation in physics, E=mc2.

Well, indeed, he was the one who gave the life and the meaning of mathematics which lead to computer graphics. Rest in peace Dr. Mandelbrot.