Benoit B. Mandelbrot, born on 20th November 1924, was a Polish-born, French and American scientist-mathematician. He has been most widely recognized and honored for his discoveries in the field of fractal geometry.
In 1975, Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures and first published his ideas, and later translated, “Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension”. According to mathematics scientist Stephen Wolfram, the book was a “breakthrough” for Mandelbrot, who until then would typically “apply fairly straightforward mathematics … to areas that had barely seen the light of serious mathematics before.” Wolfram adds that as a result of this new research, he was no longer a “wandering scientist”, and later called him “the father of fractals”:
<<Mandelbrot ended up doing a great piece of science and identifying a much stronger and more fundamental idea—put simply, that there are some geometric shapes, which he called “fractals”, that are equally “rough” at all scales. No matter how close you look, they never get simpler, much as the section of a rocky coastline you can see at your feet looks just as jagged as the stretch you can see from space.>>
Iron in the Sand 