World Famous Comics: Introducing Chaos, New Edition (Introducing)
Introducing Chaos, New Edition (Introducing)
By: Ziauddin Sardar Publisher: Totem Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Totem Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 176 Publication Date: January 25, 2005
Product Description: This book explains how chaos makes its presence felt in many varieties of event, from the fluctuation of animal populations to the ups and downs of the stock market.
Great book This was the book that got me hooked on the Introducing... series. I wanted to get a nice overview of Chaos Theory, and this book provided it.
Introducing Chaos Adequate I've read a number of books on Chaos/Complexity, and found this one to be fine. I think my favorite was the one by Mitchell M. Waldrop "Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos."
At any rate, for the audience for which the book is intended, which is someone who wants an easy-to-read introduction on chaos, I think the book is perfectly adequate.
"Chaos" (not Chaos theory) is all this book introduces you. I was looking for an easy-to-understand book on Chaos Theory for some non-English speakers (say, some Japanese students) to read, and I personally like "Introducing Fractal Geometry", so I got my hand on this book...
It was a mistake.
I would not say much about this. The author did introduce Chaos, not really Chaos theory, to the readers. He tried his best, I believe, to make things easy to understand by simplifying things... However, in doing so, he had just created Chaos.
Hence, this book is probably one of the best examples of "How Simplicity creates Complexity and Chaos"... a simple scheme found in Complex systems (like complex Cellular Automata which emerged from a simple set of rules).
One thing, while a lot of names (technical terms) were introduced, almost all of them are left unexplained. And I think only "introducing" is never enough. (Well, it was the name of the book afterall... this book wasn't named "Explaing Chaos" :)
There are other good books on Chaos for layperson. And, in fact, "Introducing Fractal Geometry" did a far better job than this one.
Introduction is what it is! This is an excellent introduction to Chaos. It is aimed at the general non academic reader who may have heard about this buzzword called "Chaos" and wondered what's it all about. It is not for the academic, informed reader but a quick introduction for the intelligent layman or someone who last formally studied science many years ago. It draws heavily on James Gleick's book "Chaos" which was the first book to popularise the subject. If you are busy and want to know something about chaos to see if you then want to find out more, this book is perfect.
Confused and Mistaken The main problem with the book is its emphasis on multiculterism, not to mention that the author simply does not know his stuff. We are told that Galileo ignored friction in order to get "neat results" and somehow caused Western science to only study linear systems. He seems to think that nonlinearity and chaos are the same thing. He tells us that nonlinear problems are not solvable. He actually suggests that we have only recently seen that the three-body problem is chaotic. (Instead Poincare proved the chaotic nature of the problem around 1890.) He seems to think that Asian philosophies actually capture the mathematical substance of chaos theory. I could go on. If you want to study chaos get the volume "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science" by Peitgen, Jurgens, and Saupe.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
