Chaos

tags

#books

Some alternative formulations of Chaos, taken from Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick

The complicated, aperiodic, attracting orbits of certain (usually low-dimensional) dynamical systems.

• Philip Holmes

A kind of order without periodicity.

A rapidly expanding field of research to which mathematicians, physicists, hydrodynamicists, ecologists and many others have all made important contributions.

A newly recognized and ubiquitous class of natural phenomena.

• Hao Bai-Lin

Apparently random recurrent behaviour in a simple deterministic (clockwork-like) system.

• H. Bruce Stewart

The irregular, unpredictable behaviour of deterministic, nonlinear dynamical systems.

• Roderick V. Jensen

Dynamics with positive, but finite, metric entropy. The translation from mathese is: behaviour that produces information (amplifies small uncertainties), but is not utterly unpredictable.

• James Crutchfield

Dynamics freed at last from the shackles of order and predictability…Systems liberated to randomly explore their every dynamical possibility… Exciting variety, richness of choice, a cornucopia of opportunity.

• Joseph Ford