格致

混沌的吸引子是最能表现“数学之美”的一种方式。今天收到World Scientific Publishing Company的Email推荐几本书，其中一个叫：IMAGES OF A COMPLEX WORLD -- The Art and Poetry of Chaos。觉得能不错，如果有对非线性动态系统及混沌理论感兴趣的朋友，不妨试着读一读。书中配有光盘，提供了1000张混沌的图片供欣赏。

想起我的导师“川上博”早年也曾经出过一本叫《Chaos CG Collection》的书，是日语的，里面给了一些用Quick Basic写成的代码，也对入门很有帮助。后来他的学生“上田哲史”出版了一本用C代码写的类似的书。也许国内的学者们也应该放下架子，改改思路，多针对高中和大学初级的年轻人们写写“开胃”的书，总是一章一章的公式，读者难免要烦的。

This coffee-table book will delight and inform general readers curious about ideas of chaos, fractals, and nonlinear complex systems. Developed out of ten years of interdisciplinary seminars in chaos and complex systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it features multiple ways of knowing: Robin Chapman's poems of everyday experience of change in a complex world, associated metaphorically with Julien Clinton Sprott's full-color computer art generated from billions of versions of only three simple equations for strange attractors, Julia sets, and iterated function systems; his definitions of 39 key terms; a mathematical appendix; and even a multiple-choice quiz to test understanding. Accompanied by a CD-ROM of the poet reading 13 poems and 1,000 images of chaos art from which slide shows can be generated and 100 high-resolution posters created. With a foreword by Cliff Pickover, author of A Passion for Mathematics.

Email中提供的圣诞打折信息：

Now if you order online using this code: NLS05, you will get a 25% discount off ALL TITLES till 31 December 2005.