'Fractal' mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85
Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, developed fractals as a mathematical way of understanding the infinite complexity of nature.
The concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy.
Mandelbrot's family said he had died in a hospice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The visionary mathematician was born into a Jewish family in Poland but moved to Paris at the age of 11 to escape the Nazis.
He spent most of his life in the US, working for IBM computers and eventually became a professor of mathematical science at Yale University.
His seminal works, Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension and The Fractal Geometry of Nature, were published in 1977 and 1982. In these, he argued that seemingly random mathematical shapes in fact followed a pattern if broken down into a single repeating shape.
