He turns out to have belonged to the select handful of twentieth century scientists who upended, as if by flipping a switch, the way we see the world we live in.

Mandelbrot created nothing less than a new geometry, to stand side by side with Euclid’s — a geometry to mirror not the ideal forms of thought but the real complexity of nature.

He was a mathematician who was never welcomed into the fraternity… and he pretended that was fine with him… In various incarnations he taught physiology and economics.

He was a nonphysicist who won the Wolf Prize in physics.

The labels didn’t matter.

Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Pictorial Archive) Paperback – Illustrated, 10 Jan. 2000 by W. A. Bentley