Customer Reviews

Chaos and Fractals: The Mathematics Behind the Computer Graphics (Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics)

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This material is the collection of lecture notes used for a short course presented by the American Mathematical Society in 1988. Therefore, the material is somewhat dated. The topics are:

*) Dynamics of simple maps
*) Nonlinear oscillations and the Smale horseshoe map
*) Fractal basin boundaries and chaotic attractors
*) Julia sets
*) The Mandelbroit set
*) Introduction to fractals
*) Iterated function systems

However, despite the passage of almost twenty years, this material is still an excellent introduction to these subjects. At the time of the conference, the material was new, exciting and it seemed that new applications of chaos and attractors were being discovered on a daily basis. At the time, I was a regular reader of the weekly "Science News" magazine and hardly an issue went by without a mention of chaos or fractals. Since it was so new, the material had to be presented at a level that led to understanding. Therefore, the modern reader that is relatively ignorant of the topics can get a great deal of benefit from this book.