Now That I Near 80, I Realize

I Conceived, Developed And Applied In Many Areas A New Geometry Of Nature, Which Finds Order In Chaotic Shapes And Processes. It Grew Without A Name Until 1975, When I Coined A New Word To Denote It, Fractal Geometry, From The Latin Word For Irregular And Broken Up, Fractus. Today You Might Say That, Until Fractal Geometry Became Organized, My Life Had Followed A Fractal Orbit.

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.

Unfortunately, The World Has Not Been Designed For The Convenience Of Mathematicians.

The Techniques I Developed For Studying Turbulence, Like Weather, Also Apply To The Stock Market

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.