part of my car-boot bonanza

If this book was a person they would have the ideal attributes to be my friend. Quirky, a bit geeky, neither deadly serious nor too flippant, and always interesting.

I knew about chaos theory, everyone does, don't they? Well no, and neither did I really. This book takes the reader through the slow and sometimes ponderous acceptance of chaos as a theory, using both well and lesser-known examples. Who would imagine that a graph used to display the movement of US cotton prices would so closely follow the data points for the periodicty of earthquakes, or the measurements for the degree of ruggedness in a coastline. From such seemingly coincidental occurences Gleick takes the reader further in to the theory and application of chaos.

The data is presented in such a fashion that it's fairly easy to assimilate, but sometimes there's just too much of it. I get the feeling that the author couldn't decide whether to make the book 100 pages shorter, or 1000 pages longer. An enjoyable read, none the less.

There's no doubt this book is responsible for adding to my wish-list! Now I shall have to read all the others in the bibliography.

RELEASE NOTES:

Reserved for a London minx.

I want to say something about how chaos theory impacts on my daily life, something about how my hair is proof that there are natural patterns in the universe that there is just no escaping from, but instead I will just say thank you to Netstation for yet another fantastic book.
I have the feeling this is going to get bumped quite a long way up Mount Toobie...

Gosh, how my head hurt at various points reading this.
It is actually a very clearly written account of how chaos theory has developed over the last fifty years or so, but with a subject as dense, as steeped in physics and mathematics, as mindbogglingly fractal as this, even the simplest text is bound to have to deal with some very complicated ideas.
But it is illuminating, if you have the patience to stick with it.
The colour photographs in the centre of the book really do tell a thousand words each, making several of the concepts covered much easier to understand - and who would have thought that Jupiter's Great Red Spot was an example of chaos in action?