Cipher in the Snow is a short story written by Jean Mizer . A short film was made in 1973 by Brigham Young University.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll The first Russian nested doll set was carved in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin... The doll set was painted by Malyutin. Malyutin's doll set consisted of eight dolls—the outermost was a girl in a traditional dress holding a rooster. The inner dolls were girls and a boy, and the innermost a baby. Zvyozdochkin and Malyutin were inspired by a doll from Honshu, the main island of Japan.

Metaphorically... known as the "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle". It denotes a recognizable relationship of "object-within-similar-object" that appears in the design of many other natural and man-made objects.

Examples include the Matrioshka brain [A matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure... of immense computational capacity. It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems]

and the Matroska media-container format [The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file.]

The "matryoshka principle" is also an example of Mise-en-abyme ["placed into abyss". The commonplace usage of this phrase is describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image, but it has several other meanings in the realm of the creative arts and literary theory. In Western art history, "mise en abyme" is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur infinitely.]

Compare Fractal. [Fractals are mathematical sets that can have dimensions that fall between the integers. They are typically self-similar patterns, where self-similar means they are "the same from near as from far". Thus, on a computer, as you zoom in on a fractal image, nothing changes and you see the same pattern appear over and over. As mathematical equations, fractals are considered nowhere differentiable, which in a concrete sense means that they cannot be measured in traditional ways.]