During my time at the University of Toronto, I dipped my toes into the fascinating field of chaos theory. I always found it to be particularly impressive how small changes in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can lead to what scientists call “deterministic chaos”.

Recently I stumbled across an animation of a triple pendulum and then across this great blogpost by Jake VanderPlas. Jake managed to recreate the animation in python and sympy. Since the equations for the triple pendulum tend to get messy Kane’s Method is the way to go.

I dont even want to take away too much. Just go to his website, download the ipython notebook Jake prepared and play around with the parameters. As they say: The flap of a butterfly’s wing really seems capable of causing a tornado.