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

If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.

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

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

If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.

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.

Many painters had a clear idea of what fractals are. Take a French classic painter named Poussin. Now, he painted beautiful landscapes, completely artificial ones, imaginary landscapes. And how did he choose them? Well, he had the balance of trees, of lawns, of houses in the distance. He had a balance of small objects, big objects, big trees in front and his balance of objects at every scale is what gives to Poussin a special feeling.