Talk:Feigenbaum function

Wikified
I have partly wikified this new page - but while doing so, I noticed that the Mathworld definition of Feigenbaum function is rather different from the description in this article. Any comments ? Gandalf61 09:12, 15 December 2005 (UTC)


 * From what I can tell, the original author confused this with the logistic map. Somewhere, misplaced (I just looked for it), I have Feigenbaum's original paper on this, which corresponds with Mathworld's entry, as best as I can remember. Opa .. found it! hell of a paper. I should read it again.linas 05:32, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I rewrote the article to reflect the more common usage of the expression Feigenbaum function.  I have seen it used only in the two senses described in the article. XaosBits 16:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Just an anecdotal comment regarding Feigenbaum constants
One of the guys I occasionally have lunch with worked with Mitchell Feigenbaum at Los Alamos. What I was told was that Feigenbaum had noticed that the rising stream of smoke from a cigarette placed horizontally in an ashtray was smooth and continuous only to a very specific height before erupting into chaos and turbulently scattering and drifting. Like all good men of our nature are, out of curiosity he looked into it more, and found that the ratio of the diameter of the cigarette to the point of chaos was somewhere around 4.7, measuring where the smoke left the cigarette to where it became unstable. Or so the story I was told goes - - -

Most commercially available cigarettes are 0.3 inches (0.76 cm) in diameter, so that would be 1.4 inches (3.56 cm) above the top of the cigarette. Practically speaking, measuring something as "nebulous" as smoke can't be done very accurately, and I've never tried lighting a cigarette to see what happens, since lighting a cigarette indoors, where there is no wind drift, to find out would result in much unpleasantness heaped upon me. I am not a mathematician, and never heard of Feigenbaum's number until my friend told me about it. Linstrum (talk) 12:12, 6 December 2018 (UTC)