Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.

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."

It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way.

Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

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.

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.

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn't expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.