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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/




I have a pdf of this book and was using LLM to translate the old code into modern, idiomatic python and it is very cool. I wonder if somebody will re-release it with modern code and tooling? In fact , google Gemini was able to do it on the fly using the posted links.



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