“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”

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

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.

I think we need to get back to truth-based news. It won’t be easy, but we better do it because otherwise we’re not acting on information.

Sadie got up and kissed Amos on the forehead. “Leave it to us, Uncle. I’ve got a plan.” “That,” I said, “sounds like very bad news.

I want every day to be the most boring news day ever. I want every day to be about spelling bee champions and baby basketball. It’s better to have no comedy material than a horrific news day.

The Gospel is news of what God has done to reach us. It is not advice about what we must do to reach God.

Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news!

There was no sign of jules. Bad news, said elliot. The man is sick. Youre going to have to settle for me. Sick? Vee demanded. How sick? What kind of excuse is sick? Sick as in its coming out both ends. Vee scrunched her nose. Too much information.

The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.

The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.