Who is Benoit Mandelbrot from Chaos: Making a New Science and what is their importance?

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Benoit Mandelbrot's family was forced to move to Paris in 1936 because of increasing Nazi power. They were later forced to flee Paris for the same reason. Mandelbrot returned to Paris after the war.

In 1960, Mandelbrot became involved in analyzing the cotton prices as an ideal data source. The data was ideal for two reasons - it was old and centralized. The old data removed some of the aspects of a fluctuating system. The fact that the data was centralized made it easier to track. Mandelbrot sifted the information through the computers at IBM and found astonishing results.