A book by
James Gleick, subtitled
Making A New Science. Chronicles the pioneering of
chaos theory, which straddles a border between
physics and
mathematics but really spills over into all disciplines of science. Chaos theory attempts to see order where
traditional science sees only, well, chaos: complex,
dynamical systems whose behavior can't be explained or predicted easily by
classical Newtonian physics.
The book covers the work of Lorenz, who studied weather forecasting to develop one of the earliest recognizable chaos descriptors in "the Lorenz attractor" (a pattern of periodic behavior where a system orbits around one or more attractors but never reaches it, and never traces the same route twice); Mandelbrot, inventor of the Mandelbrot set, which gave life to fractal geometry; and Feigenbaum, who discovered Feigenbaum's constant, which proved that there is deep underlying commonality across diverse dynamical systems.