Chaos Theory Tamed (156-499) (Excerpt)

Garnett Williams is my hero. He takes what seems like a complicated topic and makes it seem simple. Williams never assumes anything about the reader's prior understanding of any topic - he patiently and carefully explains what you need to know to understand his point. He reiterates, summarizes and gives examples so that even when you are occaisionally feeling like you might get lost, he reels you right back in.

He includes a glossary and chapter summaries which are very helpful. He also does a great job of refreshing important concepts from prior chapters as they again become relevant.

The layman's challenge in understanding scientific literature, even books written for lay audiences, often results from a minor oversight or assumption on the author's part. One little detail that, upon omission, makes the picture unclear. Williams covers every detail; he was thorough and consistent throughout.

I'd highly recommend this book for anyone trying to understand Chaos Theory or build a better foundation for the understanding of Complexity and other related sciences.

With all the noise about chaos and chaotic phenomena, Williams sets out to dispel the confusion. Powerful maths ideas are explained with enough rigour to satisfy most readers. But this is primarily not a maths text. I started reading it thinking it was, and then realised otherwise.

The ideas are not developed in a traditional maths way, with scads of theorems, lemmas and corrolaries. The exposition deliberately mimics what you are likely to see in a physics or engineering book. With a level of detail sufficient for that readership.

The main ideas covered involve fractals. How to define and measure such things as the fractal dimension of a curve or surface. Which leads into attractors and basins of attraction. Finally, the book ties chaos into related ideas from information theory; enriching an understanding of both fields.

This is an extremely well-written book. It is not a "popular science" book, but if you have a few semesters of undergraduate math, you'll be fine.

The author presents the material very clearly and cleanly, with easy examples and useful intuitive metaphors.

I wish all math and science texts were this well-written.

I am very happy having chance to read this book. Actually after the Gleicks Chaos I've tried to read "Understanding nonlinear dynamics" but some chapters were too hard to understand for me. After reading "Chaos theory tamed" the previous book was overcame in a meantime cause Williams book builds up a very strong background and is excellent step for further exploration for a non-mathematician.

thanks to gnutella network:)

Very easy to read. It is an excellent tool to readers that want a first contact with chaos theory. The math is very simple and even if you are rusty or need some basic theory the book has 7 chapters to reinforced you. If by chance you don't understand this tools then probably chaos theory is not for you.