Hénon AttractorTwo lines of arithmetic — stretch, fold, squeeze — applied over and over to a single point. Wherever you start, the dots settle onto the same thin boomerang. Zoom in and each strand splits into more strands, forever: a curve that is really a dusting of infinitely many curves.In 1976 the astronomer Michel Hénon wanted the simplest possible caricature of Lorenz’s weather chaos. His map keeps area-shrinking and folding, so orbits collapse onto a set that is smooth one way and a Cantor dust the other — fractional dimension about 1.26.