Gaston Julia

Gaston Julia was a French mathematician born in 1893 in Sidi Bel Abbès in French Algeria. Conscripted at 21 when France entered the First World War, he was severely wounded in an attack and lost his nose, and for the rest of his life he wore a leather strap over the injury. His 1918 memoir on the iteration of rational functions won the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences and gave the formula behind what is now called the Julia set. Together with Pierre Fatou he founded the modern theory of holomorphic dynamics, and his results were taken up again decades later through the fractal pictures of Benoit Mandelbrot.