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:
“I began to realize that it was bigotry of the worst kind to say that it’s better to be dead than to be born retarded or blind or without a limb. It’s a value judgment you’re making about someone’s life, based on their degree of perfection.”
—Juli Loesch (b. c. 1953)
“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)