Chaos
The word "chaos" is used in mathematics to mean something other than what it means in everyday English. In English, we speak of chaos as a state in which everything has gone awry, there is complete disorder, and there are no rules governing this behavior. In mathematics, chaotic systems are well defined and follow strict mathematical rules. Although chaotic systems are unpredictable, they do have certain patterns and structure, and they can be mathematically modeled, often by an equation or a system of equations.
Chaos theory is the study of systems that change over time and are inherently unpredictable. Some systems, such as Earth's orbit about the Sun, are very predictable over long periods of time. Other systems, such as the weather, are notoriously unpredictable. Chaos theory builds a mathematical framework to account for unpredictable systems, like the weather, which behave in a seemingly random fashion.
The last two decades of the twentieth century saw tremendous advances in our understanding of chaotic systems. Chaos theory has been applied* to the study of fibrillation in human hearts, the control of epileptic seizures, the analysis of how the brain processes information, the dynamics of weather, fluctuations in the stock market, the formation of galaxies, the flow of traffic during rush hour, and the stability of structures during earthquakes, to name a few.
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