Chaos

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Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis.

Freeman Dyson praised the book for its popular account but critiqued the omitting of the earlier work of Dame Mary L. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible…. it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field.In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor.

Admittedly it was rich in stories of key figures and their personalities, but lacking in a clear and concise explanation of chaos. from The Author Of The National Bestseller Chaos Comes An Outstanding Biography Of One Of The Most Dazzling And Flamboyant Scientists Of The 20th Century That "not Only Paints A Highly Attractive Portrait Of Feynman But Also .

the Twentieth-anniversary Edition Of The Million-copy-plus Bestsellerthis Edition Of James Gleick's Groundbreaking Bestseller Introduces To A Whole New Readership The Story Of One Of The Most Significant Waves Of Scientific Knowledge In Our Time. However there were many sections that bored me and aperiodic jumps in his focus that left me lost a bit. 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.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them. All-in-all it reads like pop-science with constant over-the-top enthusiasm in place of a clear, concise, solid explanation of what chaos is. It arises when a smooth flow of a gas or liquid suddenly turns messy, breaking up into whorls and eddies.

These subjects together form an informal "first half" of the book, and succeed in prompting readers to think through the genesis of information as something (first) represented and (eventually) manipulated in tangible forms like scripts, tones, and gears.