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Show HN: Strange Attractors

(blog.shashanktomar.com)
756 points shashanktomar | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 23:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source

I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js.

Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun.

My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to 3D, not sure if it’s mathematically correct, but it’s the coolest by far. I have left all the params configurable, so give it a try. I called it Simone (Maybe).

If you like math-art experiments, check it out. Would love feedback, especially from folks who know more about the math side.

1. Loughla ◴[01 Nov 25 00:01 UTC] No.45778041[source]▶
I got really into fractals and attractors when I was also really into mushrooms, lsd, and dmt during my graduate studies.

It actually shaped my post doc work quite a bit and shifted my focus from individual classroom education to strategic systems analysis of entire university and k-12 institutions. Somewhere along the way, a switch flipped and allowed me to view complicated hierarchies like college systems as 2-d fractal geometry in my mind. I can't really explain it, but now that I consult, I can feel when a department is broken before I can prove it with data. It's like they don't fit or reflect the main structure of the institution.

I would not suggest taking this route though. Maybe just take some graduate courses or something.

Fun fact, though, defending your dissertation to a room of around 200 people while still feeling the effects of dmt is a really good way to induce a panic attack. Source: it's me. I'm source material.