Chaos

The author lurches from story to topic with reckless abandon . Out of 30 books I've listened to, this might be the first one that I thought about skipping on every single chapter

I now feel myself to be set down an entirely new path in life as a result of reading this book, a path of infinitely more excitement, impact, and fulfillment. Thank you for this, truly and genuinely

I was motivated to read Chaos after reading that this book greatly influenced Michael Crichton in his writing Jurassic Park.I was not disappointed.Chaos provides quite the adventure story as James Gleick tells the stories of the people who fought uphill battles to pioneer this new area of mathematics and scientific thought.The punchline is that often what looks to be chaos to both the layperson and traditional science is in fact quantifiable non-linear behavior.What this book reveals about the unwillingness of the academic work to accept unpopular research, or research that goes against the grain was every bit as revealing as the fun insights to the world of chaos.

Bring your wits--you're gonna need them. Excellent overview of the movers and developments within this branch of science. Be prepared to listen... and re-listen... then maybe just one more revisit at another time. A dense subject well-handled.

Would you consider the audio edition of Chaos to be better than the print version?It's convenient to listen to, and the narrator is great. However, there are occasionally figures in the book that I had to look up to visualize (e.g. period doubling). If I had the printed version, I would not have been able to finish it as quickly as reading on the subway gives me a headache. So, while the audio is not necessarily better than the print version, it's definitely complementary. Any additional comments?Don't need a rigorous math background to understand the concepts. The historical context from Chaos made my nonlinear dynamics textbooks much more interesting! Chaos covers fascinating examples from economics to biology. The book makes it easy to look up references and original research papers. The narrator was great as well. Highly recommended for both casual readers and those who would want to delve deeper into the concepts afterwards.

When I first started looking at Chaos, my boss dismissed it as bad science and trick math. James Gleick walks you through the proof that my boss was wrong. The further you go in this book, the more you will see how "Choas" is all around us. Thought provoking and drives you to want to know more

Any additional comments?The book starts OK with interesting pieces of information.It never really defines its subject of chaos.Most natural and artificial processes and systems that have seemingly random variations may have an underlying structure that is best modeled as non-linear.That is not a big revelation but the author treats it as one.Eventually all kinds of processes are invoked and terms are tossed around with no attempt at clear understanding.

This was painful to listen to.I'm an engineer by profession and I love all of the stuff about the "butterfly effect", fractals, etc.But after giving this my best shot and grinding through listening to it for about 6 hours - I finally stopped.I could not bear to go on.It simply was not written in a way to hold my interest.Too many mundane facts.Too dry.Too technical.This was a great opportunity for the author to bring something really cool to the masses and get people interested.Instead, it was written more like a college math text book with dropping a lot of names over and over.