Chaos: Making a New Science

by James Gleick

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.