MelissaA
Brenton
Shilpa Karhik
What is Chaos Theory?
June 16th 2006 08:09
Well, I'm going to write a number of articles on Chaos Theory, so I thought I would start it off by briefly outlining what Chaos Theory is.
The Basics
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that can explain "nonlinear systems". These are systems that in some ways appear to be random, but have an underlying order. These are systems that exhibit chaos (in the mathematical, rather than the standard sense).
The Beginnings
When a weather researcher named Edward Lorenz was working with a computer model of the weather he entered in figures for the models initial conditions that were rounded to three decimal places, rather than the six that the model had previously used. The model returned significantly different results.
This idea went against the concepts of the time, which said that such a small initial difference should only lead to a minor difference in results. This result led Lorenz to search for other systems which displayed what became called, sensitive dependence on initial conditions (or the butterfly affect) and this was the beginning of chaos theory.
So what will I discuss in later posts?
Later on I will talk more about the butterfly affect, and I will discuss the Lorenz Attractor and strange attractors, as well as fractals and a number of other things. Alongside quantum theory, cryptography and artificial intelligence, I plan to make Chaos Theory a major topic of this journal.
Adam
The Basics
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that can explain "nonlinear systems". These are systems that in some ways appear to be random, but have an underlying order. These are systems that exhibit chaos (in the mathematical, rather than the standard sense).
The Beginnings
When a weather researcher named Edward Lorenz was working with a computer model of the weather he entered in figures for the models initial conditions that were rounded to three decimal places, rather than the six that the model had previously used. The model returned significantly different results.
This idea went against the concepts of the time, which said that such a small initial difference should only lead to a minor difference in results. This result led Lorenz to search for other systems which displayed what became called, sensitive dependence on initial conditions (or the butterfly affect) and this was the beginning of chaos theory.
So what will I discuss in later posts?
Later on I will talk more about the butterfly affect, and I will discuss the Lorenz Attractor and strange attractors, as well as fractals and a number of other things. Alongside quantum theory, cryptography and artificial intelligence, I plan to make Chaos Theory a major topic of this journal.
Adam
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