Mandelbrot's first foray into fractal economics, when he was discovering ways to use computers to predict fractal systems at IBM in the '60s, had major impact on the field.
Trees, clouds, numerous patterns that we see in daily life--all turned out to be fractal in nature, described by a branch of mathematics that Mandelbrot had started.
One team, for instance, inserted the virus into a program running a Mandelbrot set, a complex, mathematics-based structure named after the father of fractal geometry.