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.

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

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

The extraordinary fact is that the first idea I had which motivated me, that worked, is conjecture, a mathematical idea which may or may not be true. And that idea is still unproven. It is the foundation, what started me and what everybody failed to **** prove has so far defeated the greatest efforts by experts to be proven.

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

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.