born Nov. 20, 1924, Warsaw, Pol.
Polish-born U.S. mathematician.
He received a doctorate from the University of Paris and emigrated to the U.S. in 1958. He is best known for his work with fractals (a term he coined; see fractal geometry ), which, he showed, can occur in many different places in mathematics and in nature. He was influenced by Gaston Maurice Julia (18931978), whose work on dynamical systems theory had been forgotten until the 1970s, when Mandelbrot's fundamental computer experiments and use of computer graphics breathed new life into it. The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical set of imaginary numbers generated from a simple equation. It appears infinitely complex when graphed on a computer.