One of my Somerville students was give a presentation (jointly with one of his fellow students) about iteration and have an example with the logistic map and the period-doubling route to chaos. He seemed to be unhappy about the behavior of the map becoming messy and indicated that things become "horrible".
I then made the following comment: Some would call it [chaos] horrible, but others would call it wonderful.
To which he responded: Some people just want to watch the world burn.
2 days ago
3 comments:
I dare anyone to look at the Rossler Attractor (which has chaotic dynamics) and say that chaos cannot be beautiful.
Alternately, the Lorenz attractor is another beautiful example of a chaotic system.
Here, here! And there are myriad other examples where those came from!
My student isn't actually aware of those examples and was doing a presentation on "iterations", so he was taking the perspective that lack of convergence is bad. I encouraged him to look up more stuff about the logistic map (which was an example he used but under a different name).
And I know he reads my blog, so presumably he'll click on those links.
By the way, the Rossler and Lorenz attractors are two of the examples I use in my nonlinear systems course.
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