However, the too many personal anecdotes and unrelated biographical details were too much for my taste. Gleick never makes you feel this and takes you through some very difficult concepts with care and assurance. If you want to cultivate a general appreciation of the foundations of material reality then this is a great place to start.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. The amazing pictures and illustrations and the quotes accompanying each chapter all add to the feeling of reading an art text book rather than a science book.

The last chapter was incomprehensible hippie mysticism, then the book just ended leaving me wondering what the whole point was. Beloit Mandelbrot, an IBM mathematician working with an equation that produces fractals, arrives to give a presentation to an economics class and finds "his" equation already on the board; the patterns he's found in pure math also apply in economics, the reproductive rates and numbers of animal populations, and countless other places. Numerous theories of Mitchell J Feigenbaum and D'arcy Thompson are discussed in an elaborate manner, while also taking into account their historical background. Gleick's book was first published in 1987, so I imagine by now there have been many developments and modifications to the ideas and theories presented here. Every scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and person who cares about truth and reality needs to read this book and shift their thinking.Not to mention galaxy formation, fingerprints, shells, coastlines, or the thing that made the little dinos get the upper hand in those movies. Maybe I am just trying to figure out the initial conditions of a Hidden Markov Model with life's current visible outcome. Precisely because chaos was popping up all over, with just a few people in each of many different scientific fields, it was easy for scientists in any field to notice a paper or presentation, note the fact that is was completely different from the methods, logic, math that had relevance for their own work, that much of the work was in fact being done in other fields--and dismiss it.