CSCI 4446/5446 Course materials:
Liz's videos and written materials:
Some useful and/or interesting links: (caveat emptor!)
-
A
SIAM News piece about numerical dynamics in the solar system that
came out of a final project in this class, also
featured
on the CS Department website.
- A great article from Quanta magazine entitled
"The
Hidden Heroines of Chaos" about the people who carried out
Lorenz's computer simulations.
- xkcd's takes on chaos (and
curve-fitting)
- A nice
youtube lecture
about fractals (21 min)
- An amazing
animated bifurcation diagram
-
Riding around on the Lorenz
attractor
- A
transcript of Lorenz's 1972 speech to
the AAAS entitled "Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly's
wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?"
- Pendulum stuff:
- Henri Poincare didn't only play a formative role in the
foundation of the field of nonlinear dynamics. Among other things, he
came up with the theory of relativity and wrote down e=mc^2 before
Einstein did. Read a bit about
him here.
- Michael Skirpan's
fractal tree generator (= the mother of all solutions to PS3).
-
CU's
site license for Matlab now covers student computers!
-
The
visualization of dynamical systems page from the Nonlinear
Dynamics and Time Series Analysis Group at the Max Planck Institute
for the Physics of Complex Systems.
- Video recordings of the lectures from Steve
Strogatz's introductory course on nonlinear dynamics and chaos
- Complexity, the flip side of
chaos: complex
dynamics of a flock of starlings. Here's
the Vimeo version of that
video if you prefer that channel.
- Movies of metronomes synchronizing (modern-day equivalent of
Huyghens' pendulum clocks): an array of five
and an
array of 32 (!)
-
The
PhET project, an interactive simulator that you can use to explore
all sorts of interesting systems. Click on "Play with sims" and go to
"Physics" for the n-body simulator (called "My Solar System").
Unfortunately PhET uses Adobe Flash, which has been deprecated. I've
left this link here in case you have a workaround.
- Analog computers for nonlinear dynamical systems: the
Antikythera
mechanism and the
digital
orrery (built by Liz's advisor)
- "Guide to
Takens' Theorem" paper (heavy going, mathematically, but very
comprehensive).
- Rigid body
dynamics in zero gravity on the international space station.
- A gorgeous youtube video that zooms in on the
Mandelbrot set.
- Another gorgeous video of an
evolving 3D fractal surface.
- A 'chalkmation' youtube video - complete with music - about the
Mandelbrot
set (warning: a bit of foul language at the end).
- The
TISEAN time-series analysis toolkit.
- Chaos in the path of a Roomba
- Chaotic music & dance stuff:
- NASA's movie of
Hyperion tumbling
- Remember that wonderful
"powers of ten" video from high-school physics?
- SIAM's dynamics
tutorials, many of which were contributed by grad students in courses
like this one.
- Wolfram's Mathworld site.
- The
FAQ for sci.nonlinear. A fabulous resource.
- The Santa Fe Institute,
which has a couple of
great educational programs for graduate students (the Complex
Systems Summer School) and undergraduates (called "Research
Experiences for Undergraduates").
- The Chaos
Hypertextbook
- Helwig Hauser's visualization
of dynamical systems page. The pages above that are interesting,
too.
- Jean-Francois Colonna's
"virtual space-time travel" page, which includes lots of stuff
about the Lorenz system, pendula, the n-body problem, etc. Very nice
graphics.
- Some sources of interesting time series data:
- Would you like your own double pendulum?