Self-similarity Is A Dull Subject Because You

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.

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.

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 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.

It Was A Very Big Gamble. I Lost My Job In France, I Received A Job In Which Was Extremely Uncertain, How Long Would Ibm Be Interested In Research, But The Gamble Was Taken And Very Shortly Afterwards, I Had This Extraordinary Fortune Of Stopping At Harvard To Do A Lecture And Learning About The Price Variation In Just The Right Way.