French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot lends his name to this image, a geometric space with an infinitely complicated boundary. That is, if you zoom in, it gets more complicated, and if you zoom in again, it gets even more complicated than that, ad infinitum. You can this process here.

Mandelbrot himself had worked at IBM for two decades before setting computer technology to work on the fractal problems that intrigued him. In 1980 he announced the discovery of his "set" to the world.