This class will explore the topics of Chaos and Complex Systems Theory.

Assigned Reading on This Week's Lecture Topic:

1. The Second Half of Chapter Three of the Webmind Book.
2. What is Chaos? a five-part online course for everyone
3.  A battle plan for traffic  from The Philadelphia Inquirer
4.  Better Living Through Chaos from The Economist.
5. Earthquakes: A Matter of Luck, Most of It Bad  from the NY Times. Be sure to check out the Diagram, Quakes Aren't Increasing, It Just Feels That Way which links from the story.

 

• Write 250 to 500 words in your Internet Diary about your explorations of sites dealing with Chaos and Complexity.
• Bring a printout of your entire Internet Diary to date to class on October 8, and give it to Andrew Toy.

Some sites you might want to explore for your Diary include the following.  You may also comment on the assigned readings, and on sites linked from the lecture notes.
 

• What is Chaos? a five-part online course for everyone  posted by Dr. Matthew A. Trump Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems Univ. of Texas at Austin

• Examples of Strange Attractors.
• The WEB site of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences.
• A great deal of material on Complex Systems can be found on the Serendipity WEB Site in Bryn Mawr.
• For some useful instructional materials on Chaos go to The Chaos Experience.

Yahoo offers a useful list of sites on Chaos. ranging from mathematical treatments of the logistic equation to a discussion of chaos in Marxist dialectical materialism.