I Had Many Books And I Had

I Claim That Many Patterns Of Nature Are So Irregular And Fragmented, That, Compared With Euclid - A Term Used In This Work To Denote All Of Standard Geometry - Nature Exhibits Not Simply A Higher Degree But An Altogether Different Level Of Complexity ... The Existence Of These Patterns Challenges Us To Study These Forms That Euclid Leaves Aside As Being "formless," To Investigate The Morphology Of The "amorphous."

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.

I Conceived, Developed And Applied In Many Areas A New Geometry Of Nature, Which Finds Order In Chaotic Shapes And Processes. It Grew Without A Name Until 1975, When I Coined A New Word To Denote It, Fractal Geometry, From The Latin Word For Irregular And Broken Up, Fractus. Today You Might Say That, Until Fractal Geometry Became Organized, My Life Had Followed A Fractal Orbit.

The Existence Of These Patterns [fractals] Challenges Us To Study Forms That Euclid Leaves Aside As Being Formless, To Investigate The Morphology Of The Amorphous. Mathematicians Have Disdained This Challenge, However, And Have Increasingly Chosen To Flee From Nature By Devising Theories Unrelated To Anything We Can See Or Feel.

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.