“Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there’s always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills”

I didn’t feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

Some mathematicians didn’t even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

Order doesn’t come by itself.

My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.

When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

I didn’t want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure – I wanted to do something different.

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

I get enough of that on the news, so I didn’t want to deal with fundamentalists or any sort of thing like that. I just wanted to keep it as lighthearted as the Cold War was, which obviously it was a fun time for everybody.

The good news as Jesus preached it is not just about the minimal entrance requirements for getting into heaven when you die. It is about the glorious redemption of human life-your life.

It’s a lot easier to get in and out of a bath. Hot tubs are bad news for actors, man.

The idea of 24-hour news, if you really step back, is pretty insane. Just even saying ’24-hour news’ almost has satire laced in it.

It’s amazing that this is still news to people, but that affects the final outcome of the film.

When people are treated well, and they’re made to feel valued, they give 110 percent.

To run and work the law commands, but gives us neither feet nor hands. But better news the gospel brings, it bids us fly and gives us wings.

Child mortality since 2000 is down by 2.65 million a year. That’s a rate of 7,256 children’s lives saved each day. It drives me nuts that most people don’t seem to know this news.