At the beginning of my third year at university studying mathematics, I spotted an announcement. A visiting professor from Canada would be giving a mini-course of ten lectures on a subject called complex dynamics.
It happened to be a difficult time for me. On paper, I was a very good student with an average of over 90%, but in reality I was feeling very uncertain. It was time for us to choose a branch of mathematics in which to specialise, but I hadn’t connected to any of the subjects so far; they all felt too technical and dry.
So I decided to take a chance on the mini-course. As soon as it started, I was captured by the startling beauty of the patterns that emerged from the mathematics. These were a relatively recent discovery, we learned; nothing like them had existed before the 1980s.
