Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos/Book and Disk

by Julien Clinton Sprott

Step-by-step instructions lead the reader through the creation of a program that produces an endless number of patterns and musical sounds. The package contains over 350 examples of computer art plus an interactive disk and 3-D glasses. The source code is provided in BASIC, C, C++, Visual BASIC for Windows, and in QuickBASIC for Macintosh users. There are sixteen pages of color plates, and many black and white illustrations. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Science, Mathematics

426 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Owen]

This book is available in its entirety as a pdf from Clint Sprott's site:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/sa.htm

A few years ago I wrote code which translates the codes for various of the
strange attractors directly into the images of them.
http://owen.maresh.info/sprott/
on github:
https://github.com/graveolensa/sprott...

[Henrik Lindberg]

What a beautiful book. My grandmother gave me my first computer the year this book was published. It was also during this year I learned about fractals. So it was a nostalgic bulls-eye to find this book. Computing and programming really was more magical before we put everything in a browser and got stuck building GUIs.

I turned out two quick blog posts while reading this book, with tricks I picked up.

https://blog.k2h.se/post/hunting-for-...
https://blog.k2h.se/post/stereo-plott...

[Tim]

A really outdated book about visualization of strange attractors. The vast majority of the text is taken over by pretty pictures and the step-by-step creation of a fairly eccentric program to create the visualizations (written in BASIC, of all things). Someone gave me the book as a gift years ago and I only picked it up recently since I was teaching myself python and this seemed like a fun way to learn the plotting libraries. The first few chapters provide a decent introduction to chaos found in simple iterated equations, and a few lines of code can give you some nifty visuals. That said, the book continues for pages and pages of absolutely bone-crushing detail that most people will just want to skip.