noun Etymology: Benoit Mandelbrot a fractal that when plotted on a computer screen roughly resembles a series of heart-shaped disks to which smaller disks are attached and that consists of a connected set of all points c in the complex plane for which the recursive expression zn+1 = zn2 + c for n = 0, 1, 2, 3,…with the starting value z0 = 0 remains bounded as n approaches infinity
(After its discoverer, Benoit Mandelbrot) The Mandelbrot set is the best known example of a fractal - it includes smaller versions of itself which can be explored to arbitrary levels of detail.