There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

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.

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

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.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

I conceived and developed a new geometry of nature and implemented its use in a number of diverse fields. It describes many of the irregular and fragmented patterns around us, and leads to full-fledged theories, by identifying a family of shapes I call fractals.

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