Benoit Mandelbrot: Mathematical Genius and Jewish Survivor

The late Benoit Mandelbrot, best known as the founder of fractal geometry, was born in Warsaw to a family of Polish-speaking Jews in 1924. In 1931 he and his family moved to Paris. They spent World War II hiding in a French village, where friends of his uncle—also a famous mathematician—took them in. In his posthumous memoir, The Fractalist, Mandelbrot tells the story of his childhood as well as of his later mathematical career. Adam Kirsch calls attention to Mandelbrot’s reflections on how he escaped the fate of most of French Jewry: