The maverick mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has died of cancer in the United States at the age of 85.
Professor Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, became famous for his ground-breaking study of shapes known as fractals which provided a mathematical way of understanding the complexity of nature.
The BBC reports the concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy.
His 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.
