In an apparent coincidence, a small number of unrelated people became interested in studying aperiodic, non-linear problems arising in various fields of science all at roughly the same time. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Whilst I confess to not getting very far with it, actually from the pages I read, I found some very interesting ideas about science and maths. It's another journalist writing about mathematics, though this one anticipated the Wikipedia Age by two decades.It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. From weather prediction to materials production to medicine, there's not a realm of technology that hasn't changed with our new understandings of the patterns that connect us all. From Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the Butterfly Effect, to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s calculation of a universal constant, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals, which created a new geometry of nature, Gleick’s engaging narrative focuses on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I realised how much I was enjoying the book when I found myself twiddling my thumbs one lunch hour at work and decided to plot a simple bifurcation chart! This is a book that is more about translating the story of the science (not the science) for NOT the layman, but really the lazy layman. To tackle this issue, physicists looked at Turbulence, being the complex phenomenon par excellence, an analogy between the start of turbulence in a stream and the phase transition of liquids provided a good start. Half of what draws me to physics, to theory, to Feynman and Fermat, to Wittgenstein and Weber, is the energy that boils beyond the theory.

I was never put off by the 'technical' words, thoroughly absorbed the diagrams and as for the coloured designs. Bits of biographies from here and there and merged in little chapters which actually don't tell you anything useful/ informative about the science of chaos theory. Now of course in real life, things are much difficult, in many cases there are parameters which appear in both sides of the equation, making it second degree, a famous example being friction in the pendulum problem, which we disregard so often to keep things simple. Not to mention galaxy formation, fingerprints, shells, coastlines, or the thing that made the little dinos get the upper hand in those movies.

It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. Featured Review: So You Have Been Asked to Give a Lecture Course on the Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics. Gleick never makes you feel this and takes you through some very difficult concepts with care and assurance.Beloit Mandelbrot, an IBM mathematician working with an equation that produces fractals, arrives to give a presentation to an economics class and finds "his" equation already on the board; the patterns he's found in pure math also apply in economics, the reproductive rates and numbers of animal populations, and countless other places.