The Chaos Pages

Web pages that exploit JavaScript to do animated explanations.

Brief Explanation

These web pages illustrate graphically some of the interesting ideas in chaos and fractal theory. The basic idea is that they follow a plan, and you go through them from first to last, using the links at the top or bottom of the pages. This is a good idea if you haven’t seen them before.

But you can also visit them in arbitrary order. In the section below, there are links for each page, so you can jump to them directly.

Navigate yourself

• Sierpiński Triangle — A classic fractal drawn by a random process
• Iteration and Orbits — What happens to the sequence x, f(x), f(f(x)), etc...?
• The Logistic Map 1 — Single-step through the orbits of a simple-looking function
• The Logistic Map 2 — Graph the orbits of the logistic map
• The Bifurcation Diagram — Another way of graphing the logistic orbits
• Universality — Any function with the up-and-down shape of the logistic map will have the same chaotic behavior

More Explanation

More coming...