Maybe I will also make a little detour to the future, a long distant future. Many, many years later I was in a position where my manager at IBM and I were, well, not friends, in fact, quite hostile to each other. He was disapproving of everything I did, and though they never fired anybody they could ask me to do things that I would certainly not want to do and make it clear they didn't like me, and I saw the writing on the wall. Two small children. I was very afraid of having to look for another job in a hurry. So I went to New York to visit a person whom I'd known before and ask him - he was the President or Vice President of a major foundation " whether, in case of real trouble, he would give me a fellowship to give me time to find a good job. He said, "I was expecting your visit. Von Neumann before he died, chatting about the future, said, 'Keep an eye on Mandelbrot. He is doing something that might become very important, but is very risky. He may really sink. If he's in trouble, please help him.' I promised him; I would deliver. However, please make up with your boss, because I have very little money. If I give money to you I won't be able to give money to somebody else." As it turned out, things settled very well. A new manager came in who was a very close friend and I didn't have to get this fellowship. But I was very moved; I mean, it's very moving that this man - who was not precisely a warm person, he looked like an international banker; his family was in banking; he was a very rich man; he had been extraordinarily successful - that he was sufficiently interested both in my work and in my plight to think about it. But all told I would say I was adding layers and layers of work and solving problems that nobody had been thinking were interesting. I was creating a philosophy of research which later proved very effective; in fact writing papers with long appendices of no particular relevance but which happened to be extremely useful thirty years later. But these things were not necessarily adding up in terms of a career, I would say.
