Pickover stalk

Pickover stalks are certain kinds of details to be found empirically in the Mandelbrot set, in the study of fractal geometry.

[5] Pickover developed an algorithm (which uses neither random perturbations nor natural laws) to create very complicated forms resembling invertebrate organisms.

At the same time he coined "biomorph" for these patterns, the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the word to refer to his own set of biological shapes that were arrived at by a very different procedure.

More rigorously, Pickover's "biomorphs" encompass the class of organismic morphologies created by small changes to traditional convergence tests in the field of "Julia set" theory.

[5] Pickover's biomorphs show a self-similarity at different scales, a common feature of dynamical systems with feedback.

Example of Pickover stalks in a detail of the Mandelbrot set
An example of the sort of biomorphic forms yielded by Pickover's algorithm.
Pickover Stalk rendered with an implementation of the given pseudocode.