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Chaos theory (or chaology [1]) is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. [2]
The nature of chaos theory suggests that the predictability of any system is limited because it is impossible to know all of the minutiae of a system at the present time. In principle, the deterministic systems that chaos theory attempts to analyze can be predicted, but uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. [2]
Ralph Douglas Stacey (October 1948 – September 4 2021) was a British organizational theorist and Professor of Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, in the UK and one of the pioneers of enquiring into the implications of the natural sciences of complexity for understanding human organisations and their management.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz.
Lorenz was born in 1917 in West Hartford, Connecticut. [5] He acquired an early love of science from both sides of his family. His father, Edward Henry Lorenz (1882-1956), majored in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his maternal grandfather, Lewis M. Norton, developed the first course in chemical engineering at MIT in 1888.
Chaos theory is sometimes pointed out as a contradiction to Laplace's demon: it describes how a deterministic system can nonetheless exhibit behavior that is impossible to predict: as in the butterfly effect, minor variations between the starting conditions of two systems can result in major differences. [9]
Experimental control of chaos by one or both of these methods has been achieved in a variety of systems, including turbulent fluids, oscillating chemical reactions, magneto-mechanical oscillators and cardiac tissues. [6] attempt the control of chaotic bubbling with the OGY method and using electrostatic potential as the primary control variable.
By comparison, based on the concept of attractor coexistence within the generalized Lorenz model [26] and the original Lorenz model ([36] [37]), Shen and his co-authors [35] [38] proposed a revised view that “weather possesses both chaos and order with distinct predictability”. The revised view, which is a build-up of the conventional view ...