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.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills

Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.