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Show HN: Strange Attractors

(blog.shashanktomar.com)
763 points shashanktomar | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 23:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.246s | 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.

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atombender ◴[01 Nov 25 12:31 UTC] No.45781144[source]▶
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/

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