Fractals: What are you talking about?

	Fractals are everywhere. They show up in the most bizarre places in
every field of science and have been the most furious trend computer graphics
has ever seen, yet most people are baffled by how they work, and even what
they  are.
	Fractals are merely a special class of equations. That's it. The
complex and beautiful pictures of fractals that you have seen are nothing but
graphs of those equations. For anyone who has read Jurassic Park by Michael
Crichton or seen the movie, the whole reason that Malcolm was ever hired was
to design a system of fractal equations to simulate how the park would behave
and whether or not it would succeed (which is in real life impossible, but
the story was fiction anyway).
	Fractals are very much like the quadratic equations taught in every
algebra class. However, there is a fundamental difference: fractals have
imaginary solutions to their equations.
	Imaginary numbers are numbers that contain the constant "i", which is
equal to the square root of -1. So, 2i is equal to the square root of -1
times 2. 2i is an imaginary number. When you add a real number
(like 1, or -3.5, or the square root of 237) to an imaginary number, you get
a complex number. 2i + 1 is a complex number.
	Most fractals, such as the famous Julia and Mandlebrot sets, are
graphed by graphing the imaginary part of the equation's solutions as the
horizontal axis, and the real part as the vertical axis.
	Simple, is it not?
