Benoit B. Mandelbrot

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was born on November 20, 1924 in Warsaw, Poland. During his early life, his mother often kept him out of school, since she did not want to submit him to the epidemics. His father instructed him to have a job in manufacturing and selling clothing, which contributed to helping raise his younger brother by the age of sixteen. Most of Mandelbrot’s education was provided by his uncle Loterman, who was unemployed at the time.

Although he missed a large amount of time during his schooling, when he took the entrance exams to the Exole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole Polytechnique. He was accepted to both, yet chose to attend the Exole Normale Supérieure. After ten days, Mandelbrot transferred to the Ecole Polytechnique in hopes of ‘being the first to find order where everyone else had only seen chaos.’ In 1947 he graduated from the Ecoly Polytechnique, and applied for a French and American Scholarship. With this being granted, Mandelbrot attended Caltech, located in Pasadena, California, for two years. From that period forth, Benoit Mandelbrot was a part of several research facilities, all centered around mathematics.

In 1955 he returned to France, where he met and married his wife, Aliette. They moved to Geneva, and later had two children. When French university started expanding and looking for applied mathematicians, Mandelbrot and his family returned to Paris, so he could become a professor at the University of Lille. With the request of his former mathematics teacher, Benoit Mandelbrot began his career as a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique after completing the year at the University of Lille.

As Benoit Mandelbrot was a research member at IBM, he came to discover fractal geometry in 1967, although it was without a name until 1975. Mandelbrot has been awarded several honors, including the AMS Einstein Lectureship, the Barnard Medal, the Humboldt Preis, the IBM Fellowship, the Japan Prize, and the Lew Fry Richardson Medal. I addition to these honors, Benoit B. Mandelbrot has received many more, as he is an accomplished mathematician.