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Chaoticians have learned to expect
That each butterfly has an effect.
Is its flapping a crime
Against order and time?
All the oracles’ futures are wrecked!
— Mike Scholtes, Butterfly Effect
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Introduction1
Seeker (YouTube Channel)
Seeker (Official Website)
Dictionary
chaos : the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system — Webster See also OneLook
Thesaurus
Roget’s II (Thesaurus.com), Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, Visuwords
Encyclopedia
Chaos may refer to any state of confusion or disorder. — Wikipedia
Chaos (Encyclopædia Britannica)
Chaos (CompLexicon, Exploratorium)
Search
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Foundation
Theory
Chaos Theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as:
Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.
Chaotic behavior exists in many natural systems, such as weather and climate. This behavior can be studied through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps. Chaos theory has applications in several disciplines, including meteorology, sociology, physics, computer science, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy. A traffic model was developed showing that the system dynamics can pass under certain conditions to chaos. — Wikipedia
Butterfly Effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
The term, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.
Though Lorenz gave a name to the phenomenon, the idea that small causes may have large effects in general and in weather specifically was earlier recognized by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré and American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. Edward Lorenz’s work placed the concept of instability of the earth’s atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos. — Wikipedia
Seeker (YouTube Channel)
Seeker (Official Website)
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Innovation
Technology
How Chaos Theory Works (HowStuffWorks)
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Preservation
History
When the Butterfly Effect Took Flight (Peter Dizikes, MIT Technology Review)
Museum
Abode of Chaos (Official Site)
Abode of Chaos (Wikipedia)
Library
Library of Congress Subject Heading: Chaos (Library Thing)
WorldCat, Library of Congress, UPenn Online Books, Open Library
Bibliography
Biological Chaos and Complex Dynamics (David A. Vasseur, Oxford Bibliographies)
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Participation
Education
Chaos Theory (Learning Theories)
Education
MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
OER Commons: Open Educational Resources
Community
Organization
News
Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (American Institute of Physics)
Chaos (Phys.org)
Chaos (NPR Archives)
Book
The Chaos Hypertextbook (Glenn Elert)
Government
Document
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Expression
Game
Wolfram’s Chaos Game (Wolfram MathWorld)
Arts
What does Chaos Theory have to do with Art? (Dean Wilcox)
Language Arts
Popular Chaos Theory In Literature Books (Goodreads)
Poem
The flap of a butterfly’s wing
Causes chaos: that one little thing
Set the weather adrift,
Gave the markets a lift,
And made fractal bloke Mandelbrot king. — Rory Ewins, chaos theory
OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form
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Here are links to pages about closely related subjects.
Knowledge Form
Foundation
Theory
Philosophy Metaphysics, Logic, Epistemology, Ethics, Aesthetics
System, Cycle, Structure, Growth, Complexity, Control, Disturbance, Entropy, Chaos
Process, Manage, Design, Prototype, Implement, Assess, Revise, Maintain
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1. The resources on this page are are organized by a classification scheme developed exclusively for Cosma.