Wolfram Demonstrations Project

In his book Spirals: From Theodorus to Chaos, Philip J. Davis explores the recurrence relation

, where

and

are complex numbers. If you set

and

with

then you obtain what Davis refers to as the 'discrete' version of the spiral of Theodorus. By varying the values of

and

it is possible to obtain a wide variety of different spiral-like structures.

This Demonstration was inspired by P. J. Davis' book Spirals: From Theodorus to Chaos, Wellesley, Massachusetts: A. K. Peters, 1993.

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Spiral Explorer