The Teaching Company: Chaos - Video

Teaching > The Teaching Company: Chaos

Posted by TheTeachingCompany on October 02, 2008

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It has been called the third great revolution of 20th-century physics, after relativity and quantum theory.

But how can something called chaos theory help you understand an orderly world? What practical things might it be good for? What, in fact, is chaos theory?

"Chaos theory," according to Dr. Steven Strogatz, Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, "is the science of how things change." It describes the behavior of any system whose state evolves over time and whose behavior is sensitive to small changes in its initial conditions.

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Courtesy of Wolfgang Beyer (www.wolfgangbeyer.de)
(c) VEER David Jordan Williams/Photonica/Getty Images

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