Lorenz attractor#

This is an example of plotting Edward Lorenz's 1963 "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" in a 3-dimensional space using mplot3d.

Note

Because this is a simple non-linear ODE, it would be more easily done using SciPy's ODE solver, but this approach depends only upon NumPy.

Lorenz Attractor
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np


def lorenz(xyz, *, s=10, r=28, b=2.667):
    """
    Parameters
    ----------
    xyz : array-like, shape (3,)
       Point of interest in three-dimensional space.
    s, r, b : float
       Parameters defining the Lorenz attractor.

    Returns
    -------
    xyz_dot : array, shape (3,)
       Values of the Lorenz attractor's partial derivatives at *xyz*.
    """
    x, y, z = xyz
    x_dot = s*(y - x)
    y_dot = r*x - y - x*z
    z_dot = x*y - b*z
    return np.array([x_dot, y_dot, z_dot])


dt = 0.01
num_steps = 10000

xyzs = np.empty((num_steps + 1, 3))  # Need one more for the initial values
xyzs[0] = (0., 1., 1.05)  # Set initial values
# Step through "time", calculating the partial derivatives at the current point
# and using them to estimate the next point
for i in range(num_steps):
    xyzs[i + 1] = xyzs[i] + lorenz(xyzs[i]) * dt

# Plot
ax = plt.figure().add_subplot(projection='3d')

ax.plot(*xyzs.T, lw=0.5)
ax.set_xlabel("X Axis")
ax.set_ylabel("Y Axis")
ax.set_zlabel("Z Axis")
ax.set_title("Lorenz Attractor")

plt.show()

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