Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot Set ... is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as 'chaos'.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

Order doesn't come by itself.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.