Appetizing Tidbits
"Chance", by Henri Poincarè, taken from Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart, 1989, pp 298-299
"Reason Has Moons", by Ralph Hodgson, taken from The Silver Treasury of Light Verse, 1957, pp 129
"Final Thoughts on the Weather in England in 1953", by David Daiches, taken from The Silver Treasury of Light Verse, 1957, pp 47-48
"Ulam's Dilemma", by Philip Davis and Reuben Hersch, reprinted from The Mathematical Experience, 1981, pp 20-23
----- A Fresh Salad of Assorted Introductions
"Simple Mathematics Models with very complicated dynamics" by Robert May, reprinted from Nature, 1976, reprinted from Chaos 2 pp 151-159
"The Imbalance of Nature", chapter 13 of Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart, 1989, pp 263-282
"Classical Chaos" by Roderick Jensen, reprinted from Chaos 2, pp 91-104
"New tools to diagnose chaotic vibrations", introduction to "Experiments in Chaotic Dynamics" by F. Moon, taken from Chaotic Motions in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems, lecture notes number 298 from the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, 1988, pp 1-16
Introduction to "Four Decades of Scientific Explanation" by Wesley C. Salmon, reprinted from Volume 8 of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1989, pp 3-10
A Soup of Examples
"Nonlinear behaviour in the physical sciences and biology: some typical examples", chapter 1 of Introduction to nonlinear science by G. Nicolis, 1995, pp 1-24
"Chaos and the dynamics of biological populations", by Robert May, from Dynamical Chaos, a volume of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1987, pp 27-44
"Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" by E.N. Lorenz, reprinted from the Journal of Atmospheric Science, 1963, reprinted from Chaos 2, pp. 244-255
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Fish or Fowl?
ARCADIA, by Tom Stoppard
"The Two Cultures", C. P. Snow, 1959, pp. 1-58
"The Nature and Values of Mathematics", chapter 31 of Mathematics: A Cultural Approach by Morris Kline, 1962, pp 660-677
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Fractal Sorbet
"The Mirror", chapter 0 of Turbulent Mirror, an illustrated guide to chaos theory and the science of wholeness, by John Briggs and F. David Peat, 1989 Editor's note: the mirrorlike structure of this volume makes chapter 0 the fifth chapter in the book., pp 83-113
"Structural Heirarchy in Science, Art, and History", by Cyril Stanley Smith, taken from the volume On Aethestics in Science, 1978. pp 9-53
Cassoulet of Topology and Spices
"The Last Universalist", chapter 4 of Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart, 1989. pp 57-71
"One-way Pendulum", chapter 5 of Does God Play Dice? by Ian Stewart, 1989, pp 73-94
"The Plight of the Working Mathematician", by Philip Davis and Reuben Hersch, reprinted from The Mathematical Experience, 1981, pp 321-322
"On Physics and Mathematics", an excerpt from A Mathematician's Apology" by G.H. Hardy, 1940, pp 128-130
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A Small Literary Confection
"Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies", Greg Egan, from his collection, Axiomatic, ISBN: 1-8-5798-309-2, pp 349-368
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A Grand Dessert
"The Stability in Nature", from Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare by Paul Colinvaux, 1978, pp 199-211
"The Creation of Ecosystems", by Edward O. Wilson, chapter 9 of The Diversity of Life, 1992, pp 163-182
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Conversations over the Sherry
"The Computer: Ruin of Science and Threat to Mankind", by C. Truesdale, 1979, 1982, reprinted from An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science, pp 594-631
"Complex Systems and the Evolution of Life", Chapter 3 of Thinking in Complexity by Klaus Mainzer, 1994, pp 77-109
"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns ...
The mathematician's patterns, like the painters or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way.
Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."
G. H. Hardy"The essence of mathematics is its freedom."
Georg Cantor"... a mathematician experiences in his work the same expression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature."
Henri Poincarè"The great book of nature can be read only by those who know the language in which it was written. And this language is mathematics."
Galileo