Strange attractors

What Hacker News says

1. atombenderNov 2025
   I bought "Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos" (1993) by J. C. Sprott recently, which is a fun book about these kinds of attractors. The whole book can be downloaded online [1] from the author's web site [2].

   It's such a typical object of its time. Garishly colored cover, comes with a floppy disk (!) and there are even 3D glasses to view some of the stereoscopic color plates (unfortunately these were missing from the used copy I got). I was surprised to find that most of the programs are in BASIC (maybe easier to do graphics on Windows back then?), though a small number of them are in C.

   It's a nice book, and the author seems to have a lot of publications about chaotic systems. Anyone know him? He seems to still be teaching at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

   [1] https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/fractals/booktext/SABOOK.PDF

   [2] https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/

   Show morethread
2. jheitmannSep 2025
   There's a book covering this and more from 1993 called "Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos" by Julian C. Sprott that's freely available here: https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/SA.HTM

   It's fun (errr... for me at least) to translate the ancient basic code into a modern implementation and play around.

   The article mentions that it's interesting how the 2d functions can look 3d. That's definitely true. But, there's also no reason why you can't just add on however many dimensions you want and get real many-dimensioned structures with which you can noodle around with visualizations and animations.

   Show morethread
3. peapickerNov 2022
   "Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos" by Julien C. Sprott.

   I am lucky enough to have a 1st edition print, but there is now a free PDF online: https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/SA.HTM

   thread