Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician Every one of them is a splinter in my eye I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry And a million miles away a butterfly flapped its wings On a cold November day a man named Benoit Mandelbrot was born
His disdain for pure mathematics and his unique geometrical insights Left him well equipped to face those demons down He saw that infinite complexity could be described by simple rules He used his giant brain to turn the game around And he looked below the storm and saw a vision in his head A bulbous pointy form He picked his pencil up and he wrote his secret down
Take a point called Z in the complex plane Let Z1 be Z squared plus C And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on If the series of Z's should always stay Close to Z and never trend away That point is in the Mandelbrot Set
Mandelbrot Set you're a Rorschach Test on fire You're a day-glo pterodactyl You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wire You're one badass fucking fractal And you're just in time to save the day Sweeping all our fears away You can change the world in a tiny way
Mandelbrot's in heaven, at least he will be when he's dead Right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale He gave us order out of chaos, he gave us hope where there was none And his geometry succeeds where others fail If you ever lose your way, a butterfly will flap its wings From a million miles away, a little miracle will come to take you home
Just take a point called Z in the complex plane Let Z1 be Z squared plus C And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on If the series of Z's should always stay Close to Z and never trend away That point is in the Mandelbrot Set Mandelbrot Set you're a Rorschach Test on fire You're a day-glo pterodactyl You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wire You're one badass fucking fractal And you're just in time to save the day Sweeping all our fears away You can change the world in a tiny way And you're just in time to save the day Sweeping all our fears away You can change the world in a tiny way Go on change the world in a tiny way Come on change the world in a tiny way