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Amazon.co.uk Review
This is not a purely technical book. Instead, it focuses as much on the scientists studying chaos as on the chaos itself. In the pages of Gleick's book, the reader meets dozens of extraordinary and eccentric people. For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As for chaos itself, Gleick does an outstanding job of explaining the thought processes and investigative techniques that researchers bring to bear on chaos problems. Rather than attempt to explain Julia sets, Lorenz attractors and the Mandelbrot Set with gigantically complicated equations, Chaos relies on sketches, photographs and Gleick's wonderful descriptive prose. --Christine Buttery
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"The New York Times"
Taut and exciting . . . a fascinating illustration of how the pattern of science changes.
"The New York Times Book Review"
Highly entertaining . . . a startling look at newly discovered universal laws.
"Chicago Tribune"
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delightful read !,
By Optimistix (New York City) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Chaos: Making a New Science (Paperback)
This book is called 'Chaos : Making a new science' - so it should hardlysurprise anyone that it deals with the history of Chaos, bringing forth the elementary concepts of the field along the way. This book isn't, nor does it pretend to be, a textbook on chaos theory, so one shouldn't expect too much maths or technical details. On the other hand, a little maths is unavoidable for discussing even the most basic notions of chaos theory, so the reader should be prepared for some (not very demanding) maths. The style adopted by Gleick is to interweave the personal lives of the The idea of self-similarity, of patterns composed of infinitely-repeating Personally, i found this to be a delightful read - Gleick's writing is In brief, this is a light, breezy account of the history of Chaos, with One of the best 'Science for everyone' books i've ever read!
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More than just a book!,
This review is from: Chaos: Making a New Science (Paperback)
This book left me looking at the world in a radically different perspective. It seemed to suggest that in the late twentieth century we were begining to pin down the extremely subtle mathematics that underpinned almost everything and as a consequence were suddenly gaining an incredible insight into what's actually going on behind the scenes of the universe.You enter this book knowing chaos as a buzzword occasionally touched upon by the media and gradually realise that it describes the 'forces at work' behind a whole array of things from something as trivial as the Newton-Raphson procedure (who'd have thought a simple piece of A-level maths could give rise to cutting adge research?) to matters as important as the weather, the interepherence in phone lines, the populations in an e-cology, indeed (without meaning to give away the book's climax) it's the very set of theories and idea's that keeps human beings alive! An absolute must for anyone who's ever wondered why they wonder!
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top Book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Chaos: Making a New Science (Paperback)
This was the first book I ever read on chaos theory. I am not involved in chaos theory at all, but I was interested in finding out more about it as it was big news at the time.While at times the concept can be difficult to grasp, the author does go to great pains to make things clear. I think this book is aimed at people with some kind of background in maths, science or engineering ho know nothing about chaos theory. THe story of how chaos theory came to be is enlightening and a real insight into how such ideas evolve over time. By the end of the book I was quite able to create and run my own (basic) chaos equations. Quite a feat, really.
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