Benoit B. Mandelbrot

Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician who developed fractal geometry and coined the word "fractal." He spent 35 years as a researcher at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and finished his career as Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale. His early-1960s study of cotton prices showed that market price changes are far more extreme than the bell curve predicts, a theme he returned to throughout his work on finance.