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Chaos

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Chaos helps us in understanding the fact that there is growth and pattern in chaos itself, despite the outward appearance of being random. Truly, though, this book does a great job at explaining and giving us the unusual history of the science that brought pure mathematics out of the clouds and back into the real world, dealing with our observable reality. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

In Chaos, Gleick makes the story of chaos theory not only fascinating but also accessible to beginners, and opens our eyes to a surprising new view of the universe.I don't know if the leading thinkers on the subject would agree with this, but 'chaos theory' feels like a narrow slice of 'complexity theory' to me. I did study a bit of Physics in a past life, but you don't need to have a background in science to get something out of this book. From the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, 'chaos' is at the centre of our day to day lives. The book charts the history of the development of chaos theory from the first serious considerations of it in meteorology to its general acceptance and applicability across the scientific community. I was never put off by the 'technical' words, thoroughly absorbed the diagrams and as for the coloured designs.

While he does exhibit a fair degree of sloppiness (``unbounded'' is not a synonym for ``infinite'', ``infinite'' does not mean ``quite big''), Chaos actually isn't all that bad as a fairly shallow introduction to chaos theory. The author spent too much time in repeating the same terminology and concepts like 'strange attractors' and 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions' and not enough time making it tangible by using real examples that would have made it more meaningful.Gleick never makes you feel this and takes you through some very difficult concepts with care and assurance. I see the poetry of constant motion and evolution everywhere and I can feel the science of Chaos intuitively as I take my long walks.

A mathematician turned meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, builds a "toy weather" on what's still a fairly early computer in the early 1960s, and in working with the parameters, concludes that long-term weather forecasting is doomed--a simple deterministic system is producing unpredictable results.

The idea that a scientific idea is dead, generally for good reason (that for example it has been disproven, and thus rejected by the scientific community at large), but how in Maths, an idea can survive, and even be rediscovered, many years after it was first discovered! It was a blockbuster bestseller at the time, and it's still well worth reading, a fascinating, enjoyable introduction to one of the most important scientific developments of our time--the birth of chaos theory. Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory. Because of this book, and the many delights that have followed, I am a lover of popular science writing.

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