Pronunciation: ' man-d ə l- ˌ brät-, - ˌ bro ̇ t-
Function: noun
Etymology: Benoit Mandelbrot
Date: 1984
: 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 z n +1 = z n 2 + c for n = 0, 1, 2, 3, ⋯ with the starting value z 0 = 0 remains bounded as n approaches infinity