It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. I finally read the book that ought to have been required reading for freshman physics majors for the past 20 years!

Chaos: Making a New Science was a 1987 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee, and has been translated into eighteen languages. 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. However there were many sections that bored me and aperiodic jumps in his focus that left me lost a bit.

It's a case study in political factions and egos, sometimes cooperation and always wonder at seeing the world in a new way. In the end, this was definitely a very light and fun read and that is quit the reason it is so popular. 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. That is we have a problem, which was successfully translated into an equation where the outputs are obtained by multiplying the inputs by a certain factor, while keeping everything in the first degree. This burn of the natural world, this magic of the unknown, is what draws me to read physics and philosophy as an absolute amature.

Much of what the first generation of chaos scientists did is incredibly easy to demonstrate with a laptop computer today--but most of these chaos pioneers were working with handheld calculators, mainframe computers with dump terminals and limited and unreliable access for something so peripheral to the institution's perceived mission, computers whose only output device was a plotter.

Since most of mathematics was done by proof, this was very new inside of the field itself, and quit the breakthrough. Along the way are the fascinating stories of the rebellious scientists that had to challenge the establishment and who finally gained acceptance for their rigorous work. 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!

The content consists of a few badly written half-biographies, a few pretty pictures and vignettes of science, and no worthwhile mathematics whatsoever. Chaos helps us in understanding the fact that there is growth and pattern in chaos itself, despite the outward appearance of being random. For new doctoral students, there were no mentors in chaos theory, no jobs, no journals devoted to 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. However, the too many personal anecdotes and unrelated biographical details were too much for my taste.While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read. Still, a whole lot more could have been done to illustrate the application and implications of the subject.

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. I bought this book because I wanted to be a little bit like the fictional mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. It is wide ranging and covers all the basic topics without muddying the waters with too much detail. 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.It is interesting to contemplate how much of the themes of this book have migrated into the modern cultural consciousness. Gleick's book was first published in 1987, so I imagine by now there have been many developments and modifications to the ideas and theories presented here.