An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid - a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry - Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."

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

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...