Famous Fractals   

Rossler Attractor

The Rossler Attractor is one of the most famous strange attractors. It was found by Otto Rossler while studying the oscillations in chemical reactions. Rossler came up with three formulas that could model a chemical reaction:

dx/dt = -y – z
dy/dt = x + ay
dz/dt = b + xz – cz
(The formulas use derivatives, which is a topic studied in calculus)

The most commonly used values for a, b, and c are 0.2, 0.2, and 5.7 respectively. If the formulas with these three values are used to generate a 3-dimensional strange attractor, the figure formed is the following:

Although it might not seem so right away, this figure is a fractal since magnifying it does not decrease the amount of detail: