He first attended elementary school in Warsaw. When he was eleven years old, his family moved to France, first to Paris and then to Tulle, in south central France. When Mandelbrot entered secondary school, he was 13 years old instead of the usual 11, but he gradually caught up with his age group. His uncle Szolem Mandelbrojt, a mathematician, was a university professor, and Mandelbrot became acquainted with his uncle's mathematician colleagues. Mandelbrot's teenage years were disrupted by World War II, which rendered his school attendance irregular. From 1942 to 1944, he and his younger brother wandered from place to place. He found work as an apprentice toolmaker for the railroad, and for a time he took care of horses at a château near Lyon. He carried books with him and tried to study on his own.
After the war, at the age of 20, Mandelbrot took the month-long entrance exams for the leading science schools. Although he had not had the usual two years of preparation, he did very well. He had not had much formal training in algebra or complicated integrals, but he remembered the geometric shapes corresponding to different integrals.
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