The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.

I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

I don't seek power and do not run around

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

If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal.