I think it's very important to have both cartoons and more realistic structures. The cartoons have the power of representing the essential very often… - Benoit Mandelbrot

How could it be that the same technique applies to the Internet, the weather and the stock market? Why, without particularly trying, am I touching so many different aspects of many different things? A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something that I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee. I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in undertaking a theory of roughness. Think of color, pitch, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics. Chemistry is filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols; all are concepts derived from sensory perceptions. Roughness is just as important as all those other raw sensations, but was not studied for its own sake. … I was not particularly precocious, but I'm particularly long-lived and continue to evolve even today. Above a multitude of specialized considerations, I see the bulk of my work as having been directed towards a single overarching goal: to develop a rigorous analysis for roughness. At long last, this theme has given powerful cohesion to my life … my fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact, very late in my life.

One of my conjectures was solved in six months, a second in five years, a third in ten. But the basic conjecture, despite heroic efforts rewarded by two Fields Medals, remains a conjecture, now called MLC: the Mandelbrot Set is locally connected. The notion that these conjectures might have been reached by pure thought — with no picture — is simply inconceivable.

Engineering is too important to wait for science.