Mandelbrot was a Lithuanian Jew whose family emigrated to France. He studied first at the École Polytechnique in Paris and then at the Faculté des Sciences de Paris, where, in 1952, he obtained his PhD (supervised by Lévy). In 1958 he joined the IBM research centre in New York State. In 1975 he coined the term fractal. He was an advocate of the use of heavy-tailed distributions. From 1987 to 2005 he was on the faculty of Yale U. He was made a fellow of the AAAS in 1982. He was made a Chevalier, L’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur in 1989. His second initial, B, was his own addition and was not an abbreviation.

http://users.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot/ University website with links.