WHAT IS IT?
It has been called the most complex object known to man. It has been hailed as the most beautiful mathematical object there is.
I am not a mathematician, but I'm married to one! As a lay person, I am captivated by this fractal object. If you want an in depth explanation of what the Mandelbrot set is, take a few minutes to surf the web, or pick up a book on  Chaos.
In a nutshell, the Mandelbrot set is the result of a fairly simple mathematical function that was iterated on  a mainframe computer in the 1970s, by Benoit Mandelbrot. The resulting image looks like a bug or ink blot. When magnified at different scales, the images start to resemble the parent image.

I've done a bit of reading on this, but I will probably never be able to truly understand it in mathematical terms. I can appreciate it however as an object of immense fascination. Hope you will too!
---Sally   sally@webspresso.com
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How this applet works

This applet displays the Mandelbrot fractal set. Clicking on the image will zoom in. The "Options" bar allows you to change the maximum number of iterations, reset the image, or get help information. This applet illustrates how an image can be periodically updated while it is being computed.

Performance hints: the lower the maximum number of iterations, the faster the computation. Also, the black region (the Mandelbrot set itself) is the slowest to compute, so if you zoom includes a lot of it, computation will be slow.
Applet© Ken Shirriff: shirriff@eng.sun.com