Introducing Chaos: A Graphic Guide

The book is, as expected, a quick introduction to the topic. Sometimes it feels like rushing to fast on some ideas.I would recommend the book to anybody wanting to skim over the topic to be somehow familiar with complexity and chaos.I wasn't expecting anything further than an introduction, so I give 4 stars to the content as i believe mostly delivers on expectations

This book provides a good introduction to overview of chaos theory and to fractals. I would highly recommend this book.

This is a well-reasoned, carefully thought out book that allows for a good introduction of the subject of Chaos. I wish that the volume was a bit more of a "populist" volume (like Larry Gonick used to write and draw), but that might be a bit too much to ask these days.

Well written and fairly illustrated with almost not math. A definitely must for the curious mind with no time for a degree in physics .

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.

The main problem with the book is its emphasis on multiculteralism, 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.

My personal exploration of the ideas of improvement and change have led along a path in which quantum physics, uncertainty, chaos and complexity have almost mysteriously become topics of growing relevance. It is fitting then that this book introduced me to one of the features of chaos, the strange attractor, a mechanism that draws a system's behaviour towards particular ways of operating.Books in this series can be read in a day. They use a mix of text and cartoon style graphics to convey the key ingredients of a subject in a concise and straightforward way. The challenge of describing chaos theory is not a trivial one. Though it may require a couple of re-reads, the book does a pretty impressive job of introducing the key figures in the development of chaos theory, its key concepts and how chaos affects our lives.I was intrigued for example to find Ray Bradbury Zen in the Art of Writingas the author of `A Sound of Thunder' a short story which predates the development of chaos theory.At the heart of chaos is that complex systems, which meet a small number of criteria, will produce outcomes that are deterministic, but not predictable. This seems a paradox, and as Niels Bohr said"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."What is startling is that systems don't have to be very complex to be classed as complex, and the criteria, such as non-linear feedback can be found in most systems. The result is that chaos is all around us. What is intriguing is that science, and our desire to understand has led us to simplify our models of the world in such a way that we've created an alternate chaos free world. When we try to understand we trim off the twiddly bits and treat systems as linear. So for example our geometry is based on straight lines, yet in nature everything is raggedy edged. The fractal, is a way of seeing and appreciating the raggedness of the world and this is explored further in a related title in the series, Introducing Fractal Geometry.This volume provides an easily accessible introduction to what is I believe an important element of any real understanding of effective change processes,Perhaps further evidence of a `strange attractor' at work are the references in the final chapter to the inherent understanding of chaos within non-western cultures and belief systems such as Taoism, Buddhism Islam and Sufism. It even includes a picture of a symmetrical fractal decoration of the vestibule ceiling of the Chenar Bagh Madresseh School in Isfahan Iran. Isfahan being one of the places I visited when invited to speak recently in Iran.

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.

I found this book very dull and not informative at all. It did however acquaint one with the basic vocabulary used in Chaos theory, so I imagine it could be of use to some people

good book

I thought this might serve as a refresher to Chaos as it's some years since I learnt about it. I found it merely churned out unrelated facts, and what explanations were given were confusing at best. The diagrams are childish, pointless and often totally unrelated to the text. There are several books about Chaos on the market and I'd be surprised if they're not all so much better than this one.

My personal exploration of the ideas of improvement and change have led along a path in which quantum physics, uncertainty, chaos and complexity have almost mysteriously become topics of growing relevance. It is fitting then that this book introduced me to one of the features of chaos, the strange attractor, a mechanism that draws a system's behaviour towards particular ways of operating.Books in this series can be read in a day. They use a mix of text and cartoon style graphics to convey the key ingredients of a subject in a concise and straightforward way. The challenge of describing chaos theory is not a trivial one. Though it may require a couple of re-reads, the book does a pretty impressive job of introducing the key figures in the development of chaos theory, its key concepts and how chaos affects our lives.I was intrigued for example to find Ray Bradbury  Zen in the Art of Writing as the author of `A Sound of Thunder' a short story which predates the development of chaos theory.At the heart of chaos is that complex systems, which meet a small number of criteria, will produce outcomes that are deterministic, but not predictable. This seems a paradox, and as Niels Bohr said"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."What is startling is that systems don't have to be very complex to be classed as complex, and the criteria, such as non-linear feedback can be found in most systems. The result is that chaos is all around us. What is intriguing is that science, and our desire to understand has led us to simplify our models of the world in such a way that we've created an alternate chaos free world. When we try to understand we trim off the twiddly bits and treat systems as linear. So for example our geometry is based on straight lines, yet in nature everything is raggedy edged. The fractal, is a way of seeing and appreciating the raggedness of the world and this is explored further in a related title in the series, Introducing Fractal Geometry.This volume provides an easily accessible introduction to what is I believe an important element of any real understanding of effective change processes,Perhaps further evidence of a `strange attractor' at work are the references in the final chapter to the inherent understanding of chaos within non-western cultures and belief systems such as Taoism, Buddhism Islam and Sufism. It even includes a picture of a symmetrical fractal decoration of the vestibule ceiling of the Chenar Bagh Madresseh School in Isfahan Iran. Isfahan being one of the places I visited when invited to speak recently in Iran. Zen in the Art of Writing

I enjoyed reading it...the cartoons helped...i,m still not sure how it can be applied to anything.