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

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.