Chaos: Making A New Science is the best-selling book by James Gleick that first introduced the principles and early development of chaos theory to the public. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and was shortlisted for the Science Book Prize in 1989.
The first popular book about chaos theory, it describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without resorting to complex mathematics. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. It remains in print and is used as an introduction to the topic for the mathematical layman. An enhanced ebook edition was released by Open Road Media in 2011 adding embedded video and hyperlinked notes.
Famous quotes containing the words making and/or science:
“You all talk like somebody else made these laws and Pharaoh don’t know nothing about ‘em. He makes ‘em his own self and he’s glad when we come tell him they hurt. why, that’s a whole lot of pleasure to him, to be making up laws all the time and to have a crowd like us around handy to pass all his mean ones on. Why, that’s a whole everything under the sun! Next thing you know he’ll be saying cats can’t have kittens.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)