“In mathematics and science definition are simple, but bare-bones. Until you get to a problem which you understand it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages and years and years of learning.”

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.

It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales…

Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

By definition a sequel can’t be original. So you’ve got to figure out what worked the first time around.

progress, whatever your definition of it, is not inevitable.

The definition of love is giving.

Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.