When Mitchell Feigenbaum began thinking about chaos at Los Alamos, he was one of a handful of scattered scientists, mostly unknown to one another. A mathematician in Berkeley, California, had formed a small group dedicated to creating a new study of “dynamical systems.” A population biologist at Princeton University was about to publish an impassioned plea that all scientists should look at the surprisingly complex behavior lurking in some simple models. A geometer working for IBM was looking for a new word to describe a family of shapes—jagged, tangled, splintered, twisted, fractured—that he
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