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.
[...]
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