Benoit Mandelbrot, Creator of the Mandelbrot Set

Benoit Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 20, 1924 to a Jewish family. With the threat of Nazi Germany, Mandelbrot and his family moved to France when he was 11 years old. His family had a strong academic tradition, his mother was a medical doctor and he was introduced to mathematics by his two uncles. However, his father worked as a clothing trader. Mandelbrot remained in France through World War II, and near the end of his college studies, he attended Lycée Rolin in Paris, until the start of the war when his family moved to Tulle. He returned to Paris in 1944 and studied at Lycée du Parc in Lyon and attended École Polytechnique from 1945 to 1947. He studied aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1949. In 1952 he received a Ph. D. in mathematical sciences from the University of Paris. Mandelbrot married Aliette Kagan in 1955 and they moved to Geneva, Switzerland and then Lille, France. The couple moved to the United States in 1958 where Mandelbrot joined the staff at the IBM Research Center and remained there for 32 years.

Mandelbrot on Wikipedia.