I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

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

I don't seek power and do not run around

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

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

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

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.