Chaos

Product Information

The content consists of a few badly written half-biographies, a few pretty pictures and vignettes of science, and no worthwhile mathematics whatsoever. As much about the history of chaos theory and the scientists who pioneered it as the science itself.

The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. So I got exactly what I was looking for and now I can talk about chaos theory Jurassic Park style, which is all I wanted. 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. An enhanced ebook edition was released by Open Road Media in 2011, adding embedded video and hyperlinked notes.He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or shoots the reader into energized, cumuliform heaps. But he exaggerates the importance of these topics, presenting them as a holistic revolution in physics, overthrowing reductionism, which just isn't the case. To be honest I'd say it's not for the faint-hearted but if you're "into" this kind of thing then you'll most likely enjoy "Chaos". Gleick makes heroes out of Mandelbrot Benoît and the others and weaves an otherworldly charm around their ideas.

At the same time, it was received with suspicion, after all it lacked a solid link with the natural world, and some thought of it as some kind of geometrical shapes obtained by someone playing with a computer. However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory.

Because of this, I found the book frustrating - both too complex to really grasp, and too superficial to really provide useful insight into the concept. The few things that kept being used as examples were the motion of water in a stream (fluid dynamics), or air tubulence. This is my 2nd attempt at this book almost 2 years later and the book is still uninteresting as it was before. Admittedly it was rich in stories of key figures and their personalities, but lacking in a clear and concise explanation of chaos.

Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrations in "Jurassic Park". But there are always chances that changes in initial condition might accumulate into something different. I was never put off by the 'technical' words, thoroughly absorbed the diagrams and as for the coloured designs. Robert Sapolsky said, "Chaos is the first book since Baby Beluga where I've gotten to the last page and immediately started reading it over again from the front: I've found this to be the most influential book in my thinking about science since college.In fairness, there was a long gap where I put this book down after having read the first half, so I recognize that I lost the continuity of the narrative.

James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. 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. The amazing pictures and illustrations and the quotes accompanying each chapter all add to the feeling of reading an art text book rather than a science book. In the end, this was definitely a very light and fun read and that is quit the reason it is so popular. 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. Gleick gives an unorganized overview some fun mathematical concepts like fractals, strange attractors, and chaos theory.