Heinz-Otto Peitgen is a German mathematician who taught at the University of Bremen, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. His books on chaos and fractals were worldwide bestsellers for several decades. From 1981 to 1988, Peitgen's lab was one of the only computer graphics labs in the hands of mathematicians and physicists. His and Peter Richter's groups produced several movies with the Goettingen Institut fuer den Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF), and two for Spectrum-Verlag, Heidelberg, which was responsible for the the German edition of Scientific American. One of these was titled "Fractals: An Animated Discussion."