Strange Attractors:

Creating Patterns in Chaos

My book, Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos (ISBN 1-55851-298-5), describes a simple method for generating an endless succession of beautiful fractal patterns by iterating simple maps and ordinary differential equations with coefficients chosen automatically by the computer. It contains over 350 examples of such patterns. Each pattern produces a corresponding piece of fractal music.

The book describes methods for visualizing objects in three, four, and higher dimensions and explains how to produce 3-D stereoscopic images on the computer screen using red/blue glasses which are included with the book. The book and accompanying 3.5" IBM-PC disk contain source code in BASIC, C, C++, Visual BASIC for Windows, and QuickBASIC for Macintosh as well as a ready-to-run IBM-PC executable version of the program.

Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos was published by M&T Books (a subsidiary of Henry Holt and Company), 115 W. 18th Street, New York, NY 10011 (1-800-628-9658).

The book is currently out of print, but it is available in Microsoft Word manuscript form as well as a machine-translated html version and a pdf version (8 MB!).