Following his graduation in physics, he received a NATO fellowship to study phase transitions and superconductors in Orsay, France (1965–66).
He then joined IBM Zürich Research in Switzerland (1966–68) to study phase transitions in perovskites.
His research fields were broad and varied, including condensed matter physics, fluid dynamics, complex systems, and geophysics.
[2][3] He spent sabbaticals at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York (1972–73), at General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York (1978–79), as the Williams Otis Crosby lecturer of Geology at MIT (1997), at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK, and at Imperial College London (1999).
[1] His book Fractals (Plenum, 1988) was translated into several languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Russian.