General self-similarity: An overview

Consider a self-similar space X. A typical situation is that X looks like several copies of itself glued to several copies of another space Y, and Y looks like several copies of itself glued to several copies of X-or the same kind of thing with more than two spaces. Thus, we have a system of simultaneous equations in which 'higher-dimensional formulas' specify how to glue the spaces together. This idea is developed in detail elsewhere [1,2]. The present account explains the theory in outline.