Benoit Mandelbrot, whose pioneering work on fractal geometry made him one of the few modern mathematicians to approach widespread fame, died October 14 at the age of 85. The cause, his wife told The New York Times, was pancreatic cancer.

Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” in 1975 to describe irregular shapes in nature and in mathematics that exhibit self-similarity—like snowflakes or Romanesco broccoli, they look roughly the same at varying scales. The so-called Mandelbrot set, a plot of complex numbers whose boundary forms a fractal, provided perhaps the most visually entrancing embodiment of the concept.
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Scientific American

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