I Went To The Computer And Tried

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.

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.

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.

When People Ask Me What's My Field? I Say, On One Hand, A Fractalist. Perhaps The Only One, The Only Full-time One.

An Extraordinary Amount Of Arrogance Is Present In Any Claim Of Having Been The First In Inventing Something.