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.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

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.

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

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere

When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.