Understanding of complicated spatial patterns emerging from wave interference, scattering and diffraction is frequently aided by insight from topology: the isolated places where some fundamental physical quantity -- such as optical phase in a complicated light field -- is undefined (or singular) organize the rest of the field. In scalar wave patterns, the optical phase is undefined at nodes at points in 2D, and lines in 3D, in general whenever 3 or more waves interfere. Similar singularities occur in optical polarization fields, and these quantized defects bear some morphological similarity to defects in other systems, such as crystal dislocations, diclinations and quantum vortices in condensed matter physics, etc.I will describe the features of these optical singularities, concentrating on three cases. The first will be three-dimensional optical speckle, familiar as the mottled pattern in reflected laser light. Natural speckle volume is filled with a dense tangle of nodal phase singularity lines. We have found in computer simulations that these lines have several fractal scaling properties. Secondly, by controlling the interference using diffractive holograms in propagating laser light, I will show how these nodal lines can be topologically shaped to give a range of loops, links and knots. Finally, I will describe the natural polarization pattern that occurs in skylight (due to Rayleigh scattering in the atmosphere), originally discovered in the 1800s by Arago, Babinet and Brewster. This pattern contains polarization singularities, whose global geometry has several physical interpretations and analogs.