Hofstadter first described the structure in 1976 in an article on the energy levels of Bloch electrons in perpendicular magnetic fields. It gives a graphical representation of the spectrum of Harper's equation at different frequencies. One key aspect of the mathematical structure of this spectrum – the splitting of energy bands for a specific value of the magnetic field, along a single dimension (energy) – had been previously mentioned in passing by Soviet physicist Mark Azbel in 1964 (in a paper cited by Hofstadter), but Hofstadter greatly expanded upon that work by plotting all values of the magnetic field against all energy values, creating the two-dimensional plot that first revealed the spectrum's uniquely recursive geometric properties.