Resumen de Chaotic dynamical systems, deceptive computers and new instructional technologies

M. Artzrouni

• Chaotic dynamical systems are defined and illustrated with the "doubling function". After less than 60 iterations the orbits become 0. This is due to the binary coding of real numbers in a computer. The simulation dramatically shows that computers may give deceptive (false) results when calculations are done a large number of times. The convergence to 0 does not occur with the "tripling function" but results are equally inaccurate if not visibly so. The presentation illustrates the use of Matlab's "Notebook" in the classroom. Those can be used to present computer simulations "embedded" within a Word 97 document that contains the body of the lecture.