I was never great at doing math but the concepts that surround mathematical mystery I find endlessly fascination. This book deals as the title suggests with complexity and chaos from the theory standpoint and has a great deal of short biographical info on the scientists and mathematicians who developed chaos and other theory's.
Of great interest to me was the story of the mathematician named Alan Turing he was a brilliant mathematician and was responsible for breaking the "enigma" code the Germans used in World War II.
Turing's works was so advanced and ground breaking in terms of computer technology and biology. The very sad part of the story was that he ended up committing suicide do to his sexual orientation. Homosexuality was illegal in the UK in the 1950's. His work with morphogenesis or oscillating chemical reactions was truly ground breaking and, had he been able to continue in his work one can only imagine what discoveries he may have made.
He is just one of many interesting men that have made remarkable discoveries and developed physical laws and theory's that literally shape our technological world.
I know that this sort of reading for some is akin to a root canal but for me I get lost in the mystery of these theory's and marvel at the grand scale of some of this scientific investigation and the under laying mathematical complexity
I studied some thermodynamics when I took Power Engineering back in the 1980's but it didn't capture my attention much then.
This book has done a great job of laying out the laws of thermodynamics in a very simplified way that makes sense to me and ties together chaos theory in a fascinating and entertaining way
No comments:
Post a Comment