Chaos Demonstrations

Overview

For a number of years I have been giving an introductory course on Chaos at Caltech (Physics 161), emphasizing the the characterization of chaos in experimental systems and theoretical tools to understand the chaos. Computer demonstrations of chaotic systems have played an important role in the course. I started off using an overhead projector in front of the class, but since the programs were platform dependent, they were not ideal for student use. This prompted me to see if JAVA provides a good platform for such a project, and the demonstrations here result from the early stages of this work. Over several years this has evolved into a fairly complete set of interrelated lecture notes and demonstrations that you can find here.

Demonstrations

Only useful if your browser supports JAVA.

The demonstrations use the Java Graph Class Library version 2.4 by Leigh Brookshaw.

I have made various modifications to pieces of the library to incorporate "double buffering" to eliminate the flicker in animated plots. I have made an archive (zip) file of the source and class files.

You can find the complete course material here.


Bibliography
[Return to Home Page]
Last modified 18 August, 2009
Michael Cross