A Hands-On Introduction to Nonlinear Dynamics — by Harmen J. Jonker and Maarten van Reeuwijk.
A hands-on tour from simple one-dimensional maps to strange attractors and fractal geometry. The book is built around the idea of learning by doing: it develops the theory alongside concrete computations — with a weekly exercise for every topic — so each idea can be explored, visualised and experimented with directly. It grew out of the Chaotic Processes course at TU Delft; see the About page for the full story.
- Online: https://mvreeuwijk.github.io/chaosbook/
- PDF: the book and the Maple cookbook are published alongside the site
(
chaosbook.pdf,cookbook.pdf) and rebuilt on every push tomain.
- Maple edition — complete. The current, canonical edition.
- Python edition — planned. A parallel edition in the same repo; see ROADMAP.md.
The Maple edition is what ships today. A Python edition is planned as a parallel implementation inside this same repository, sharing the mathematical exposition and exercises while swapping the code, figure-generation workflow and notebooks.
The book is a mono-repo: one Sphinx source tree per edition, plus shared resources and the figure-generation audit trail.
maple/ the Maple edition (complete)
python/ the Python edition (planned; not yet created)
shared/ resources common to every edition (refs.bib, custom.sty, custom.css)
creators/ Maple worksheets + porting guide — the source of truth for figures
build/ generated HTML/PDF (git-ignored)
Each edition has its own conf.py and index.md but pulls shared resources
from ../shared via config. See shared/README.md for how a
new edition plugs in, and creators/README.md for the
figure → worksheet mapping.
pip install -r requirements.txt
make maple # HTML -> build/maple/html
make python # HTML -> build/python/html (once python/ exists)
PDF (per edition):
sphinx-build -b latex maple build/maple/latex
cd build/maple/latex && latexmk -pdf main.tex
Corrections, typo reports and suggestions are very welcome — especially errata, since the exercises and figures are central to the book. Please open an issue (an erratum template is provided) or send a pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for build details and conventions.
If you use or reference the book, please cite it. Machine-readable metadata is in CITATION.cff; once a stable release is archived on Zenodo, a DOI will be added there and cited here.
- Text, figures and other creative content: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Code (Maple worksheets, Python code, printed code fragments): MIT