Shawn

“But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France’s purist mathematical establishment. “I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition,” he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home. As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick. The late 1950s, though, were the beginning of a golden age of pure research at IBM. “We can easily afford a few great scientists doing their own thing,” the director of research told Mandelbrot on his arrival. Best of all, he could use IBM’s computers to make geometric pictures. Programming back then was a laborious business that involved transporting punch cards from one facility to another in the backs of station wagons.”
― Jim Holt, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought