John Updike

One of the main characters in John Updike's novel Roger's Version is Dale, a computer science graduate student seeking some fingerprint of God in fractal structures (and also funding for his research from the Harvard Divinity School). The novel includes discussions of cellular automata, fractal trees, the Koch curve, and the Mandelbrot set. In a sequence of computer zooms, Dale believes he sees the hand of God, if only feetingly.
Theology notwithstanding, Updike has gotten the basic mathematics right. For example,
"There's a branch now of math, between math and physics, really, that you can do on a computer; they set up these cellular automata, little colored tiles each representing a number, with a certain small set of rules about what color combinations in the surrounding tiles produce what color of each new tile, and it's amazing, however simple the rules look, how these astounding complex patterns develop. Some end very abruptly, out of their internal logic, and some give signs of going on forever, without ever repeating themselves. My own feeling is with this sort of mathematical behavior you're coming very close to the texture of Creation, you could say; the visual analogies with DNA jump right out at you, and there're a lot of physical events, not just biological but things like fluid turbulence, that are what we call computationally irreducible - that is, they can only be described step by step. Now, on a computer you can imitate this, if you find the right algorithms. That's what they're beginning to use computers for, this study of chaos and complexity. The implications are enormous: if the physical universe can be modelled by a computational system, and its laws regarded as algorithms, then on a sufficiently powerful machine, with enough memory, you could model reality itself, and then interrogate it!" (pg 102)
and
"A tree, like a craggy mountain or a Gothic cathedral, exhibits the quality of 'scaling' - its parts tend to repeat in their various scales the same forms." (pg 236)