Benoit Mandelbrot (born November 20, 1924, Warsaw, Poland—died October 14, 2010, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.) Polish-born French American mathematician universally known as the father of fractals. Fractals have been employed to describe diverse behaviour in economics, finance, the stock market, astronomy, and computer science.

Mandelbrot was educated at the École Polytechnique (1945–47) in Paris and at the California Institute of Technology (1947–49). He studied for a doctorate in Paris between 1949 and 1952 and then did research for a year under John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1958 to 1993 he worked for IBM at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, becoming a research fellow there in 1974. From 1987 he taught at Yale University, becoming the Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences in 1999. source

A Sanskrit grammarian, Pingala, is credited with the first mention of the sequence of numbers, sometime between the fifth century B.C. and the second or third century A.D. Since Fibonacci introduced the series to Western civilization, it has had a high profile from time to time. Recently, in The Da Vinci Code , for example, the Fibonacci sequence is part of an important clue."