http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us...elbrot.html?hp

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed an innovative theory of roughness and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.
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Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.



I did research in the 80s on using 3D mandelbrot and julia sets as first approximations for developing custom flight simulators for Boeing customers.

Here's a nice toy for playing with them: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/julia/explorer.html
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Among other things computer animation would not be the same without Mandelbrot as fractals are used all of the time to create realistic environments. Big loss. R.I.P.
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