Within the Jurassic Park novel, in between various chapters, we see inset images of a fractal being drawn. Specifically, this is the Dragon Fractal. I'll spare the details about this specific fractal but, suffice to say, we see the first iteration early in the book, and after every chapter (or possibly 2 or 3, I can't recall) we see another inset of the next iteration.
I also seem to recall that under each iteration there might have been a quote from Ian Malcolm, often regarding chaos theory since it is one of the central themes of the story.
I was 16 when I read the novel shortly after the film was released and I've not picked it up since then. I recall being fascinated with the fractal images because I'd thumbed through the book and seen them before I even began reading. This made me curious about the fractals purpose, but to my recollection, the inclusion of the fractal was never really explained and I recall being a bit frustrated about not understanding why it was there to begin with. Yes, it was a neat set of mathematics, but I failed to see it's purpose.
So, why did Crichton include the drawing of the fractals in the book? What purpose did the illustration serve within the story? It might be obvious but as a 16 year old, and since then, I've never figured out the purpose for including the images in a story about dinosaurs "finding a way" to survive when they had been engineered to be incapable of reproduction.