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.

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

I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

I've been a professor of mathematics at Harvard and at Yale. At Yale for a long time. But I'm not a mathematician only. I'm a professor of physics, of economics, a long list. Each element of this list is normal. The combination of these elements is very rare at best.