Attractive attractors

摘要

For those of us who can best cope (or can only cope adequately) when mathematical procedures can be envisaged as processes in space, the graphic plotting of chaotic systems comes as something of a relief, reclaiming visual territory lost to the logicians of symbolic computation since the era of Descartes. The algebra of chaos bears fruit graphically in the illusory space behind the computer screen, yielding the strangely beautiful secrets of its attractors and fractal self-similarities to new virtuosi of the electronic palette.