Chance And Chaos

How do scientists look at chance, or randomness, and chaos in physical systems? In answering this question for a general audience, Ruelle writes in the best French tradition: he has produced an authoritative and elegant book--a model of clarity, succinctness, and a humor bordering at times on the sardonic.

In the bestselling tradition of Switch and Made to Stick, Ori Brafman reveals how organizations can drive growth and profits by allowing contained chaos and disruption the space to flourish, generating new ideas that trigger innovation. In The Chaos Imperative, organizational expert and bestselling author Ori Brafman (Sway, The Starfish and the Spider) shows how even the best and most efficient organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army, benefit from allowing a little unstructured space and disruption into their planning and decision-making.

"An introductory though mathematically reliable text" that brings together the complementary approaches of the phenomenological theory of chaos, with its focus on complexity and unpredictability, and the statistically oriented ergodic theory. It is intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students from applied sciences; it requires a sound knowledge of calculus, while some basic experience in measure theory and discrete dynamical systems would be helpful. c. Book News Inc.

The present collection of reprints covers the main contributions of David Ruelle, and coauthors, to the theory of chaos and its applications. Several of the papers reproduced here are classics in the field. Others (that were published in less accessible places) may still surprise the reader.The collection contains mathematical articles relevant to chaos, specific articles on the theory, and articles on applications to hydrodynamical turbulence, chemical oscillations, etc.A sound judgement of the value of techniques and applications is crucial in the interdisciplinary field of chaos. For a critical assessment of what has been achieved in this area, the present volume is an invaluable contribution.

When a strange book lands in twelve year old Fable's lap, and her cousin disappears into its pages, she follows, hurtling into an enchanted forest far from the rolling hills of her home. With the help of her peculiar new friends, Fable must learn to trust in herself or risk losing her cousin forever. Can she save him before it's too late?

A physicist and science writer takes the reader on a journey from physics and biology to psychology in search of the nature of chance. Chance plays a greater role in our lives than most of us suspect--or can accept. Though we like to imagine that we are in control, science says otherwise. This witty, informative introduction to the unnerving power of chance explores the randomness at the core of reality and discusses its profound implications. Physicist and science journalist Florian Aigner helps us to understand a key scientific paradox: On the one hand science uses precise mathematical formulae to reliably explain the natural world, but on the other it can neither predict nor plan the future. In a very readable, humorous approach, the author uses entertaining stories from Schrödinger's cat and Skinner's pigeons to superstitious baseball players and the weirdest game of monopoly ever played. All of which demonstrate the role that chance plays in sickness and health, failure and success, elementary particles, the human genome, the weather, and psychology. Understanding how randomness works and the law of large numbers may increase our chances of success. But in the end, the author says, we would all be a lot happier by accepting that the future just cannot be perfectly planned. His advice? Press play and enjoy the ride.

This book, based on lectures given at the Accademia dei Lincei, is an accessible and leisurely account of systems that display a chaotic time evolution. This behaviour, though deterministic, has features more characteristic of stochastic systems. The analysis here is based on a statistical technique known as time series analysis and so avoids complex mathematics, yet provides a good understanding of the fundamentals. Professor Ruelle is one of the world's authorities on chaos and dynamical systems and his account here will be welcomed by scientists in physics, engineering, biology, chemistry and economics who encounter nonlinear systems in their research.

This book defines, describes, and prescribe the newly emerged paradigm of complexity of change-how a simple system ruled by a deterministic law can evolve in a manner too complex to predict in detail in the long run. After explaining, through examles, the underlying idea of sensitive depenence on initial conditions caused by non-linearity, id describes the powerful qualitative techniques.