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:
“Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.”
—Clifton Fadiman (b. 1904)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)