What the rain knows

Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science was first published by Springer in 1992. I’ve got the 2nd edition (first printing, it seems), published in 2004.

The authors, in order of appearance on the cover and in the signature of the preface: Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jürgens, and Deitmar Saupe.

According to the above-linked Wikipedia page for Saupe, the book won the American Publishers’ Association award for Best Mathematics Book of the Year in 1992. I can’t find an award site to confirm this fact and it isn’t noted in either of the prefaces.

Preface to the 2nd edition

The first preface (to the 2nd ed.) notes the differences between the first and second editions:

• Two appendices have been removed - one by Yuval Fisher on the subject of fractal image compression because Fisher’s since published a book on the subject. They don’t detail the subject of the other appendix and I can’t find a table of contents for the 1st edition.
• There was a BASIC program at the end of each chapter of the first book and those have been replaced with a set of 10 Java applets posted online at http://www.cevis.uni-bremen.de/fractals/. CEVIS is the Center for Complex Systems and Visualization at the University of Bremen, which has been home, at one time or another, to all of the authors.

I noticed at least two typos in the preface. Apostrophes were missing when the authors talked about Yuval Fisher’s appendix or Yuval’s book (i.e. Yuval Fishers and Yuvals, respectively).

Preface to the 1st edition

The preface begins with a quote from James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science. I’ve read and didn’t care for Gleick’s book.

Points of interest from this preface:

• This book is written for everyone, even without much knowledge of technical mathematics, wants to know the details of chaos theory and fractal geometry. They go on to say that it’s not a textbook, but not written in popsci style either.
• Fractals and chaos have, for students, brought math out of the realm of ancient history into the twenty-first century.
• Elements of Euclidian geometry are basc visible forms like lines, circles, and spheres, the elements of fractal geometry are algorithms.
• Fractals and modern chaos theory are linked by the fact that many of the contemporary pace-setting discoveries in their fields were only possible using computers.
• This book is a close relative of the two-volume set Fractals for the Classroom, which was published by Springer-Verlag and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1991 and 1992. [Fractals for the Classroom was written by the same three mathematicians who wrote Chaos and Fractals].
• The other appendix removed from the 2nd edition is revealed to have been a treatment of multifractal measures by Carl J.G. Evertsz and Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

• The entire book has been produced using the TEX and LaTex typesetting systems where all figures (except for the half-tone and color images) were integrated in the computer files. Even though it took countless hours of sometimes painful experimentation setting up the necessary maxcros, it must be acknowledged that this approach immensely helped to streamline the writing, editing, and printing.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under self-study and has been assigned the following tags: books, chaos, Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science, fractals, math, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.