Mandelbrot set 2026-10-14
For , the Mandelbrot set is . Thus it records the nonescaping finite critical orbit. The connected Julia set criterion for a polynomial says that the corresponding filled Julia set is connected exactly for these quadratic parameters. Parameters with an attracting fixed point form the main cardioid: its multiplier gives the fixed point and parameter , with . Its boundary has a cusp at . There the critical orbit increases along the real interval to the parabolic fixed point , so the cusp belongs to the set. The real section extends from to ; the familiar period-two bulb is attached at .
For , the Mandelbrot set is the set of parameters for which the finite critical orbit remains bounded. It is a compact connected parameter set. Its main cardioid consists of parameters with an attracting fixed point, with a period-two bulb attached on the left, smaller bulbs attached recursively and fine filamentary structure. It is symmetric about the real axis and meets that axis in . The quadratic filled Julia set is connected exactly when belongs to this parameter set; outside it, the rational critical point escapes and the Julia set is a Cantor set. Thus it organizes the contrasting phase-space dynamics of the quadratic family, rather than itself being a Julia set in the dynamical -plane.
Figure 1.
Informal Mandelbrot-set sketch, with the cardioid cusp and period-two attachment marked
. Details.
The affine map , its own inverse, gives
This value is unique even among Möbius conjugacies. The finite fixed point of is zero and its periodic-orbit multiplier is one. Holomorphic conjugacy preserves that periodic-orbit multiplier. Infinity has periodic-orbit multiplier zero for a quadratic polynomial, so a corresponding multiplier-one fixed point of must be finite; it obeys and , forcing . To locate it explicitly, a quadratic fixed point of periodic-orbit multiplier gives . The boundary parametrization has its cusp at , so is the right-hand cusp on the Mandelbrot boundary. It is in the set: the critical orbit starts at zero, stays in and increases to the fixed point . For real , the increment is strictly positive; a bounded critical orbit would have a limit solving , which has no real solution. These nearby real parameters escape, proving that the cusp belongs to the boundary of the full Mandelbrot set as well.
The fixed points of on the sphere are zero and infinity. There is no neighborhood of zero on which all iterates converge to zero, even pointwise: a negative real initial point satisfies , so its iterates decrease without a finite limit and escape to infinity. Every neighborhood of zero contains such points. At infinity there is a uniformly attracting neighborhood in the chordal metric. In the reciprocal coordinate ,
For , its modulus is at most . Thus the reciprocal iterates tend uniformly to zero there, proving uniform convergence to infinity on the corresponding sphere neighborhood.
For the given disc, is equivalent to , and hence to . Under the iteration becomes
If , then , so . Consequently the half-plane is forward invariant and
This proves uniform convergence to zero on the disc and therefore . It is the explicit parabolic disk for z minus z squared.
Let . The iterate family is normal on the connected open set . Every subsequential limit along equals zero on ; by the identity theorem it is zero throughout . If the full sequence failed to converge uniformly on some compact subset, a further normal subsequence would contradict that conclusion. Hence locally uniformly throughout . Complete invariance of the Fatou set puts in a Fatou component. Since , that component is , so .
We prove the reverse-image assertion, rather than assuming that a basin has only one component. Each connected component of maps properly to : for compact , the sphere preimage is compact, and its intersection with is closed in it because is a relatively closed component of . Its image is open by holomorphic openness. To prove it is closed in , lift a convergent sequence of image points to preimages in . Their images eventually lie in a compact neighborhood inside ; properness gives a convergent preimage subsequence with limit in and the desired limiting image. Thus the image is also closed, and equals the connected target . Moreover itself is one such component: it lies in by forward invariance, and any connected inverse-image component containing it lies in and hence in by maximality.
Now and its entire preimage is , counted twice. Every component of must contain a preimage of , so every one must be . Therefore
This is the Fatou component containing an entire fiber is completely invariant argument. The convergence on this component is locally uniform: it cannot be uniform on all of , because for every and contains nonzero points.
Finally suppose zero belonged to the Fatou set. A normal subsequence on a disc around zero would have limit zero, since that disc meets in an open set where the entire sequence tends to zero. The identity theorem forces this limit to be zero on the whole disc. Uniform convergence in a smaller finite coordinate disc would then imply derivative convergence at zero by the Cauchy integral formula. But
for every , whereas the derivative of the zero limit is zero. This contradiction proves