What is this strange, varied and most wonderfully intricate land that we have stumbled upon? No doubt many readers will already know. But some will not. This world is nothing but a piece of abstract mathematics – the set known as the Mandelbrot set.1 Complicated it undoubtedly is; yet it is generated by a rule of remarkable simplicity! To explain the rule properly, I shall first need to explain what a complex number is. It is as well that I do so here. We shall need complex numbers later.
The Mandelbrot set
