mandelbrot believed he had to play games with his work. he had to couch original ideas in terms that would not give offense. he had to delete his visionary-sounding prefaces to get his articles published. when he wrote the first version of his book, published in french in 1975, he felt he was forced to pretend it contained nothing too startling. that was why he wrote the latest version explicitly as "a manifesto and a casebook." he was coping with the politics of science.

from pp 112-113 of james gleick's "chaos: making a new science" < viking, new york: 1987. >