
Chaos, and what to do about it (2018) - devicetray0
http://chaosbook.org/
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scottlocklin
Cvitanovic's book, and apparently Cvitanovic himself (I've traded an email or
two, but he's friends of friends -and seems to always make a big impression in
person) is amazing. It's been around in some form or other since I was
wrapping up my ph.d. thesis in a related subject, and I remember being mad as
hell it didn't exist when I started as it had the most understandable
explanations of the Gutzwiller trace formula. The late Dieter Wintgen's papers
were also good, but not as didactic, and without so many examples.

I should work out all the problem sets in J and publish the results. Seems
like a properly impish trolling.

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QuesnayJr
I've never had a strong incentive to read it, so I have only looked through
it, but I love it. I fantasize about writing a book just like it on a subject
that I know well.

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ncmncm
This book looks really useful: a complete introduction with all the
prerequisites, in one place.

(I apologize that this comment is not funny.)

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agumonkey
rest assured that your lack of funnness is appreciated :)

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Razengan
Is "chaos" simply the point where _humans_ lose the ability to keep track of
things, or is there a more ..universal definition?

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chr1
The ability of an observer to keep track of things is not relevant, and even
completely computable things like cellular automata can be chaotic [1]. The
common definition of chaotic dynamics [2] requires the system to be sensitive
to initial conditions, mix the state space, and have dense periodic orbits.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30#Chaos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30#Chaos).

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Chaotic_dynamics)

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Razengan
Thanks.

I found this to be the most intuitive example (for myself to grok):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum#/media/File:De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum#/media/File:Demonstrating_Chaos_with_a_Double_Pendulum.gif)

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nexus2045
Made me think of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-
body_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem)

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bArray
I was really hoping for some crazy clone of a Chromebook, like what a
Hackintosh is to a Mac, but with some form of chaos.

The book is very interesting though :)

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npsomaratna
I was hoping for the Warhammer 40k type of chaos. Oh well, one can dream ...

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babuskov
I was hoping to read what's it about here in the comments, without opening the
website, but ...

For people like me: It's a book about theory of chaos.

To quote:

> By now, there are also many physics textbooks on "chaos". Most lack depth,
> and many of them are plain bad, emphasizing pictorial and computer-graphics
> aspects of dynamics and short changing the student on the theory. That's a
> pity, as the subject in its beauty and intellectual depth ranks alongside
> statistical mechanics and quantum field theory, with which it shares many
> fundamental techniques. The book represents authors' attempt to redress the
> balance and present the subject as one of the basic cornerstones of the
> advanced graduate physics curriculum of future

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james_s_tayler
I was hoping it was going to be a Netflix engineering-as-marketing tactic
where they do an extremely deep dive on chaos engineering.

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fyp
I thought this was going to be about the popsci book with a similar name:
_Chaos: Making a New Science_

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64582.Chaos](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64582.Chaos)

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layoutIfNeeded
Ah, I loved that book as a teen. Unfortunately I lent it to an ex whom I broke
up with before she had returned it and never spoken with eversince.

I fondly remember tinkering with a PHP program (that was the only language I
knew at the time ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯) to draw the bifurcation diagram of the logistic
map which then I used as my desktop background.

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mzanchi
:) I wrote a couple of tables on Excel v1 that was running on the original
Mackintosh we had at home to play around with the same equations.

