Mandelbrot is the man all Hippies should thank for the fractal posters they're so fond of.

He coined the word fractal in 1977 and had all kinds of fun with self-similarity and partial dimensions along the way.

Z' = (Z^2) + C

He often seems to get bundled in with the notion of chaos too.

See the mandelbrot set.
The Mandelbrot set is his discovery, and serves as a sort of index into the Julia set. The set (whose border can only be approximated), the values of C for which Z'=Z^2+C never diverge, happens to also be the set of hyperplanes on which there are non-diverging values in the respective Julia.

Mandelbrot has also done much more than that one fractal; he has written many a treatise on the fractal nature of nature, for example.

blaaf: Thanks for pointing out my inappropriate word choice. I've fixed it. You can stop flaming me now.

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