At the beginning of my third year at university studying mathematics, I spotted an announcement. A visiting professor from Canada would be giving a mini-course of ten lectures on a subject called ...

The Mandelbrot set is possibly the most reproduced mathematical entity of all time, on account of how with a bit of image processing, you can make extremely pretty and interesting pictures with it.

And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum. —Jonathan Swift, from "On Poetry: A Rhapsody" The satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels might have been talking about ...

It was just over 20 years ago that the Mandelbrot set took the world by storm. Pictures of extraordinary complexity and beauty appeared in scientific and glossy magazines, on the walls of art ...