Loved reading this. It reminded me of my first night in Kuala Lumpur. Chuck and Gelo were talking about a phycisist/mathematician (I can no longer remember which) who had an epiphany whilst in the beach. Marc and I weren’t exactly following so they tried to explain some chaos theory basics.
This post is a nice primer to Initial Conditions with respect to Chaos Theory.
Chaos and Initial Conditions
Category: Chaos
Posted on: October 26, 2009 10:07 PM, by Mark C. Chu-Carroll
One thing that I wanted to do when writing about Chaos is take a bit of time to really home in on each of the basic properties of chaos, and take a more detailed look at what they mean.
To refresh your memory, for a dynamical system to be chaotic, it needs to have three basic properties:
1. Sensitivity to initial conditions,
2. Dense periodic orbits, and
3. topological mixing
The phrase “sensitivity to initial conditions” is actually a fairly poor description of what we really want to say about chaotic systems. Lots of things are sensitive to initial conditions, but are definitely not chaotic.
via Chaos and Initial Conditions : Good Math, Bad Math.