The image above shows an example of how a strange attractor is produced by successive stretching and folding. The stretching causes orbits on the attractor to exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions (chaos), and the folding causes the fractal (strange) microstructure. The image is a succession of Poincare sections in the x-x' plane at 24 successive phase angles for a damped, driven pendulum described by x'' + 0.05x' + sin(x) = 0.6 sin(0.7t). The image above is also available as an AVI movie file.

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