Abstract
Let us imagine that we have been travelling on a great journey to some far-off world. We shall call this world Tor’ Bled-Nam. Our remote sensing device has picked up a signal which is now displayed on a screen in front of us. The image comes into focus and we see. [...] What can it be? Can it be some strange looking insect? Or could it be some vast and oddly shaped alien city, with roads going off in various directions to small towns and villages nearby? Maybe it is an island — and then let us try to find whether there is a nearby continent with which it is associated. This we can do by ‘backing away’, reducing the magnification of our sensing device by a linear factor of about fifteen. Lo and behold, the entire world springs into view. [...] We may explore this extraordinary world of Tor’ Bled-Nam as long as we wish, tuning our sensing device to higher and higher degrees of magnification. We find an endless variety: no two regions are precisely alike — yet there is a general flavour that we soon become accustomed to. [...] 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, p. 74–79].
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Emmer, M. (2012). The Fantastic World of Tor’ Bled-Nam. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2427-4_2
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