An introduction to chaos theory

The idea of ‘Chaos’ has been around for thousands of years, originating with the ancient Greeks from
whom the word comes. Chaos meaning the confused disorganised nothingness that was here before
the universe was created. The word stayed in use in language up till now keeping its meaning of
general disorganisation and confusion although in the 20 th century, chaos took on a new scientific
meaning which was to revolutionise the way things are thought about today, not just scientifically.

The idea behind chaos is fairly simple and beautiful and isn’t new either, although it’s scientific
application and understanding is. Basically put, it is that with a given starting point, infinite
complexity can be found if a process can be continued for an infinite amount of time.

The first thing that is needed to understand this

mathematically is iterations. This is when a set of
rules are applied repeatedly. In maths, a set of
rules changing one thing into another can be
called a function. To the right I’ve illustrated an
example of a function machine.

A function is something that takes an input, that being something with a quantity, and produces an
output directly based on what was put in. Iteration is just a small but vital step different. When
something is iterated, that output is then fed back into the function. This is done repeatedly up to an
infinite number of times. I have a single step of the iteration of my example function further below.

The iteration can continue on an infinite number of times. Now, infinity is a concept that’s been
around for hundreds of years in maths and is as much a philosophical question as it is a
mathematical term. In Dr.Who, the Time Lords had an analogy for an infinite time ‘Somewhere on
Gallifrey, there’s a very tall mountain, taller than Mount Everest, made of solid granite and every
million years a tiny bird lands on the top and touches it with a feather. An eternity is the time it takes
for the mountain to wear down to nothing.’ 1Yet this analogy doesn’t even give us a fraction of
infinity. The fact that a figure or a size can never be put on it means that it could never be used in
maths to make anything real, we can only look at things that are moving up continuously yet we
know they will never reach infinity as anything greater than infinity is infinity. We call things like this
‘tending towards infinity’. Back to iterations! If we continue on iterating a function an infinite
number of times, only a few types of result can happen-

It keeps getting bigger in magnitude- diverges (can be positive or negative)

It keeps getting smaller- converges to 0

It stops at a number- converges

It finds a steady cycle- converges to a period

It makes a nonsensical mess- chaotic

The problem with this is that if you want to find out what happens to something after an infinite
number of iterations you can’t just put infinity into the function. This is where looking at things as
they tend to infinity comes in useful. It also means that if we iterate something less than an infinite
number of times it is only an estimate, so anything we make that’s a visual representation, for
example a fractal, is just an estimate to the infinite. It also means that anything we find like this in
real life is only an estimate.

The other characteristic of iteration is that the final result depends strongly on what you started
with. This is commonly known as sensitivity to initial conditions and is probably the most famous
feature of what we now call dynamical systems. It was supposedly said by Ed Lorenz, a famous
meteorologist, mathematician and one of the founders of modern chaos theory that ‘if a butterfly
flaps its wings in Brazil it could cause hurricanes in san Texas’. This is a reference to the weather
acting as a massive worldwide dynamical system. A small change in the conditions of the air in one
place can cause a chain reaction of events that can get bigger and bigger until they cause something
like a hurricane. This same principle is applicable in many scenarios, from the state of the economy
to the population of a spices and even in the creation of a thought in your brain.

Dynamical systems are all examples of functions acting on sets of numeric conditions although this
isn’t the only way chaos manifests. If you take a shape and put it through a function, a set of rules,
and repeat this you commonly find fractals.

The word fractal comes from fractional dimension and that’s exactly what it is, something with a
fractional dimension. Looking at a dimension, a dimension is a very difficult thing to define and again
is a highly philosophical question although in maths it is simply defined as ‘the minimum number of

1
The science of Doctor Who by Paul Parsons ISBN 978-1840467-91-8 page 312
co-ordinates needed to specify any single point’ 2. An object that is one dimensional is a line, which
has length only. Something that is two dimensional has both length and width. If given that a line is
infinitely long, supposedly if it was contorted enough it would be able to reach every one of the
infinitely many points in a plane, thus having both length and width and becoming two dimensional.
Knowing that a line can be 2D with enough contortion gives to the idea that a slightly less contorted
line could be in-between 1 and 2 dimensional therefore fractal. This arises with functions as
functions iterated infinitely on a shape one a line can contort it in a way that it converges to a shape.
This shape is then a fractal.

Any repeating patterns in nature such as the growth of a fern leaf or the building up of a shell all
follow a set of rules and do roughly the same thing each time, thus making fractals in nature.

2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension