Topological classification of scattered IFS-attractors

We study countable compact spaces as potential attractors of iterated function systems. We give an example of a convergent sequence in the real line which is not an IFS-attractor and for each countable ordinal delta we show that a countable compact space of height delta+1 can be embedded in the real line so that it becomes the attractor of an IFS. On the other hand, we show that a scattered compact metric space of limit height is never an IFS-attractor. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.