Benoît Mandelbrot

"How Long Is the Coast of Britain?"

"Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce."

"Engineering is too important to wait for science."

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line."

"For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself."

"Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines"

"Many creative minds overrate their most baroque works, and underrate the simple ones."

"A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension."

"If you have a hammer, use it everywhere you can, but I do not claim that everything is fractal."

"Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently."

"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."

"A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales..."