Chaos: Making a New Science

This history of science traces how researchers in the later twentieth century came to treat chaotic systems as a field rather than as noise. Gleick follows meteorologist Edward Lorenz and the butterfly effect, Benoit Mandelbrot's fractals, Mitchell Feigenbaum's period-doubling constants, and work on strange attractors, turbulence, and nonlinear dynamics in physics and biology. The book explains, in narrative form, how simple deterministic rules can produce unpredictable long-term behaviour, and how computers made those patterns visible. It is an account of a change in scientific attention: from linear models toward irregularity in weather, populations, and fluids. The argument is historical and explanatory, not a textbook of equations.

Quarter-bound in yellow cloth with black paper sides, printed in white with a design by Raquel Leis Allion.