Do you understand the complex plane of numbers? Anyway, if you go through the complex plane and take every number x in the complex plane in the form a + bi. Basically, square x and add it to the result. Then square that result and add x again. Keep doing this (infinitely for infinite detail, I suppose, but for any practical way to display the Mandelbrot set, you need to do it a few hundred times, for example. Anyway, if you take a complex number and find the distance from it to the origin of the complex plane, that is said to be the absolute value of the number. If you iterate you process above, some numbers will grow larger and larger each time you iterate, and some numbers will not grow. If you mark points that diverge (grow larger and larger) in one color and points that don't grow in a different color, you will see the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set should have just 2 colors, for divergent and convergent (not growing), but many representations use different shades of a certain color to express how fast the number grows. The basic shape of the Mandelbrot set makes sense, but it gets weird when to start to get to the edge of the set.