Though people had long noticed these special patterns by which the natural world organizes itself, the term fractal was coined about 50 years ago by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot ...

Hailed as the man who reshaped geometry, French-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot first coined the word “fractals” to ...

The Mandelbrot set is — when visualized with some colors — an interesting shape with infinite detail. While the patterns are immediately obvious to the human eye, anyone who’s run one can ...

Mandelbrot didn't invent the concept of fractals—mathematicians had been studying self-similar patterns for ages—but he did coin the word and usher in our modern study of the concept.