Indra’s Pearls by David Mumford, Caroline Series and David Wright, Cambridge, £29.95, ISBN 0521352533
FRACTALS. “That damn hippy graphic again?” Thus artists of my acquaintance react, looking over my shoulder at a laptop screen proudly displaying the paisley-patterned extravaganzas that are the Mandelbrot set. Some mathematicians may concur: it seems there’s been an awful lot more random exploration of the infinite detail of these pictures than production of deep results.
Indra’s Pearls promises a lot more than this. David Mumford, Caroline Series and David Wright—professors of mathematics at Brown, Warwick and Oklahama State universities respectively—open their consideration of a quite different family of fractals with the…
