Gleick argues in the book that since a self-repeating pattern needs only less information to be encoded, we find it commonly in complex organs of living things, like human lungs, as DNA needs to encode very little information to tell the body how to create that organ. There are many naturally occurring fractals like snowflakes, trees, blood circulatory systems, lighting, etc. The system is too complex and entangled that we can never know what would have happened even if we make a small change.įractals are patterns that are self-similar across different scales. A butterfly’s flap might cause a tornado or might even prevent one. But what the idea actually talks about is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in large complex systems, which means that even a small change in initial conditions could lead to huge changes later. The general idea most people have about the butterfly effect is that it signifies small factors that cause huge changes later on (like a butterfly flaps its wings in Peking and you get a tornado in New York).

Butterfly Effectīutterfly effect is the most popular concept of chaos theory and perhaps the most misunderstood also. Also, it was great fun to recreate the wonderful visuals presented in the book using Python and below I cover some of them. It was a revelation to understand concepts like Butterfly Effect, Strange Attractors, Mandelbrot set, etc. I recently read the amazing book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick and it introduced me to the science and beauty of Chaos. Fractals in Nature (Photo credit: cyclonebill/Wikipedia)

Chaos gleick