Beauty and roughness : introduction
How I came to be a scientist. Roots, of flesh and the mind ; Child in Warsaw, 1924-36
Adolescent in Paris, 1936-9 ; Dirt-poor hills of unoccupied Vichy France, 1939-43 ; On to Lyon : tighter occupation and self-discovery, 1943-44 ; Horse groom near Pommiers-en-Forez, 1944 ; Alleluiah! the War moves away and a new life beckons
My long and meandering education in science and in life. Paris : exam hell, agony of choice, and one day at the École Normale Superieure, 1944-45 ; A (then rare) foreign student at École Polytechnique, 1945-47 ; Pasadena : student at Caltech during a Golden Age, 1947-49 ; French air force engineers : reserve officer in training, 1949-50 ; Growing addiction to classical music, voice, and opera ; Life as a grad student and Philips Electronics employee, 1950-52 ; First Kepler moment : the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution of word frequencies, 1951 ; Postdoctoral Grand Tour begins at MIT, 1953 ; Princeton : John von Neumann's last postdoc, 1953-54 ; Paris, 1954-55 ; Wooing and marrying Aliette, 1955 ; In Geneva with Jan Piaget, Mark Kak, and Willy Feller, 1955-1957 ; An underachieving and restless maverick pulls up shallow roots, 1957-58
My life's fruitful third stage. At IBM Research through its Golden Age in the sciences, 1958-93 ; At Harvard : firebrand newcomer to finance advances a revolutionary development, 1962-63 ; On to fractals : through IBM, Harvard, MIT, and Yale via economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics, 1963-64 ; Based at IBM, moving from place to place and field to field, 1964-79 ; Annus mirabilis at Harvard : the Mandelbrot Set and other forays into pure mathematics, 1979-80 ; A word and a book : "fractal" and The Fractal Geometry of Nature" ; AT Yale : rising to the university's highest rank, Sterling Professorship, 1987-2004 ; Has my work founded the first-ever broad theory of roughness? ; Beauty and roughness : full circle.
