Chaos and Fractals. New Frontiers of Science

Blurb

The fourteen chapters of this book cover the central ideas and concepts of chaos and fractals as well as many related topics including: the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, cellular automata, L- systems, percolation and strange attractors. This new edition has been thoroughly revised throughout. The appendices of the original edition were taken out since more recent publications cover this material in more depth. Instead of the focused computer programs in BASIC, the authors provide 10 interactive JAVA-applets for this second edition. TOC:Introduction: Causality Principle, Deterministic Laws and Chaos *The Backbone of Fractals: Feedback and the Iterator *Classical Fractals and Self-Similarity *Limits and Self-Similarity *Length, Area, and Dimension: Measuring Complexity and Scaling Properties *Encoding Images by Simple Transformations *The Chaos Game: How Randomness Creates Deterministic Shapes * Recursive Structures: Growing Fractals and Plants * Pascal's Triangle: Cellular Automata and Attractors * Irregular Shapes: Randomness in Fractal Constructions * Deterministic Chaos: Sensitivity, Mixing, and Periodic Points * Order and Chaos: Period-Doubling and Its Chaotic Mirror * Strange Attractors: The Locus of Chaos *Julia Sets: Fractal Basin Boundaries *The Mandelbrot Set: Ordering the Julia Set