The complex plane. Surprise in Newton’s method. The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils. Art and commerce meet science. Fractal basin boundaries. The chaos game.

Psinet to Sell Consumer Internet Division". The New York Times. July 2, 1996 . Retrieved March 23, 2009.Bolch, Ben W. (January 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Southern Economic Journal. 55 (3): 779–780. doi: 10.2307/1059589. ISSN 0038-4038. JSTOR 1059589. In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling. Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather. If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern!" ـ Mandelbrot

Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6. Neat, huh? I'm totally stoked by these bad boys. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them. Loevinger, Lee (Summer 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Jurimetrics. 28 (4): 505–509. ISSN 0897-1277. JSTOR 29762101.New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity. At the beginning, the second simulation behaved just like the first. But then, the variables’ behavior started deviating. As simulated time went on, they got more and more out of sync. Finally, the motion of the second graph looked totally different from the first. Modeling wildlife populations. Nonlinear science, “the study of non-elephant animals.” Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree. A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal. But ultimately none of this is going to be the lasting impact of this book. The reading pleasure and the hero worship of these daredevils is transient after all. For me, the real impact is that it has changed the way I look at the ordinary everyday world - the leaves, the trees, the pebbles, the pattern on the peels of an orange - everything is strangely magnified and beautiful now. I see the poetry of constant motion and evolution everywhere and I can feel the science of Chaos intuitively as I take my long walks. I can see Strange Attractors and Fractals and unstable equilibriums in the most mundane places. And this is the greatest gift of the book.

However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory. This is my 2nd attempt at this book almost 2 years later and the book is still uninteresting as it was before. I believe this is one of the most "overrated" books out there. The book is hugely popular, always comes at first when you are looking for recommendations about chaos theory books. So, first time I really had doubts about myself. I thought maybe I am not doing justice to this book. I still had my doubts this time. So, I spent substantial amount of my time behind this book. And I think I have done enough and cannot do anything more for this book.

Success!

My big grievance with this book is it falls too short. His narrative is compelling, yes, the stories are interesting, sure, but he doesn't grab the central characters as well as a new journalist like John McPhee does. He floats too far above the actual science and complexity. He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or shoots the reader into energized, cumuliform heaps.

Balazs, Nandor (March 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 64 (1): 112–113. doi: 10.1086/416224. ISSN 0033-5770. JSTOR 2831779. Michalski, Jerry (January 31, 1994). "Pipeline: Not Just Another Pretty Face" (PDF). Release 1.0. pp.9–11 . Retrieved March 23, 2009.I also found it unstructured and confusing. Players show up in one chapter, abruptly disappear in the next, and sometimes reappear years (chapters) later. I never knew what was coming and how it was going to fit in to the whole. Apparently this book made a big splash when it was first published. I remember the excitement around chaos theory and fractals at the time. Frenkel, Karen A. (1 February 2007). "Why Aren't More Women Physicists?". Scientific American. 296 (2): 90–92. Bibcode: 2007SciAm.296b..90F. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0207-90 . Retrieved 11 July 2017. A discovery about cotton prices. A refugee from Bourbaki. Transmission errors and jagged shores. New dimensions. The monsters of fractal geometry. Quakes in the schizosphere. From clouds to blood vessels. The trash cans of science. “To see the world in a grain of sand.”