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.

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.

It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

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

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

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

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.