Deterministic chaos was discovered, but not noticed widely, several times in
the last hundred years. |
First, Henri Poincare discovered chaos in his 1895 work on the 3-body problem
in astronomy. |
Abstract mathematical formulations were made by Jacques Hadamard and Garrett Birkhoff. |
Lucy Cartwright and
L. E. J. Littlewood found chaos in the behavior of radar circuits during World War II. |
Ed Lorenz produced
the first numerical explorations of chaos in his 1963 weather model. |
|
All these works are
recorded in libraries, yet none seems to have captured a substantial audience.
Perhaps the first to
attract wide attention was |
Robert May's 1976 work on simple population dymanics. |
Some of the
history is recorded in Gleick's Chaos. |