Mandlebrot set

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2492 at blake.acs.washington.edu> themod at blake.acs.washington.edu (Chris Hinton) writes:
>I am in search of a function that, given a point in the complex plane, will
>return the number of iterations it takes to determine if the given point is
>in the Mandlebrot (sp?) set. 

Not asking much, are you?
A solution to this would probably qualify you for the Fields medal.

A more practical requirement would be:  Given coordinates of a point in the
complex plane and an iteration count limit, determine whether the iterative
Mandelbrot computation (z <- z^2+c starting with z=0) produces a z with
norm > 2 within the iteration limit.