“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.”

I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

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.

Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

I’ve been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I’m not a mathematician only. I’m a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set … is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as ‘chaos’.

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

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.

Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.

I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist’s life in France.