Attractors are portions or subsets of the phase space of a dynamical system. Until the 1960s, attractors were thought of as being simple geometric subsets of the phase space, like points, lines, surfaces, and simple regions of three-dimensional space. More complex attractors that cannot be categorized as simple geometric subsets, such as topologically wild sets, were known of at the time but were thought to be fragile anomalies. Stephen Smale was able to show that his horseshoe map was robust...
