Liam's+cool+math+thingy+(chaos+theory)

=Chaos Theory= Most people have heard of the butterfly effect. That is, a butterfly that flaps its wings in Brazil eventually causes a tornado in Texas. This is essentially, an easily understood analogy to the Chaos Theory. It is basically the general term for the branch of mathematics that studies complex dynamic systems (things changing relative time). Chaos Theory can describe many complex systems in our world including weather, movement of celestial bodies, population growth, Brownian Motion (random movement of molecules), turbulent flow, and even plate tectonics and the stock market.

Formally, it consists of 2 basic parts which state that: Which basically mean that everything is the way it is because of the buildup of many small changes and changing just one of these contributors fractionally would result in dramatic differences. It also is quite frustrating because it states that every system has a reason and thus formulas that could explain it, but that those formulas are so complex that they would be almost impossible to determine.
 * No matter how complex a system is, it must rely upon some fundamental order that defines it.
 * Very small changes to the initial conditions of a system can cause very dramatic and complex behaviours.

Chaos is a very recent concept in mathematics which was developed in the 1960s although not all thought up by one person. The name Chaos, however was first used by Jim Yorke, a mathematical from Maryland, US. Before the idea of chaos theory existed, mathematicians thought that dynamic systems that displayed behaviours that were not periodic, forever increasing or forever approaching a fixed point were completely random and unsolvable. One of the first recorded observations of chaos was by meteorologist, Edward Lorenz in 1961. He was running a weather simulator on a computer and decided to take a shortcut by starting the simulation halfway and using the data that he had copied earlier. He was baffled when the results came out completely different than the first time the simulation was run and he later figured out it was because he had copied the data to 3 decimal places and the computer stored up to 6 decimal places. Such a dramatic change from changes in the thousandth place clearly demonstrate that the weather does depend completely on the initial conditions of the world but also that no modern computer or measuring system could predict it at all accurately because it would not be precise enough.

To learn more watch: []

or visit: [] []