The Aizawa Attractor
Lorenz's stranger, weirder cousin
Like Lorenz, Aizawa is three coupled differential equations dragging a single point through 3D space. Unlike Lorenz's butterfly, the trajectory here folds itself into a knotted, basket-handled torus with a vertical spike through the centre — a shape so distinctive it is one of the most photographed strange attractors in chaos theory. Tiny changes in the parameters reshape the whole geometry: a single dial turns the basket into a flower, then into a vase, then into chaos.
