SOURCE: A review of Chaos, in Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 65–69.

In the following unfavorable review of Chaos, Franks disparages the notion of a “chaos revolution” and objects to Gleick's misrepresentation of chaos theory, fractal geometry, and mathematical methodology.

[Chaos] is a book about new ways in which mathematics is used to model phenomena in the real world. It is intended for a general audience. The author is James Gleick, formerly a science reporter for the New York Times. He does a good job explaining what constitutes a mathematical model (by which he means a differential equation or a difference equation) and what it does. The theme of the book is that even rather simple non-linear models can, and typically do, exhibit extremely sensitive dependence on initial conditions. What this means is that two solutions of a non-linear ordinary differential equation can start with very close initial...