On Monday, April 5th, I attended Professor Jacobson's lecture, "Dynamical Systems and the Chaos Theory." I did not walk in with expectations, because I honestly had no idea what a dynamical system was. Nor was I about to make a guess at the chaos theory. I think I was mostly surprised, because the last thing I figured would be happening was that we were going to sit through a mathematical lecture. I guess when I think chaos I do not immediately think of graphs or equations.
I learned a lot in this lecture, mainly because it was all new to me. For instance, I was finally told what a dynamic system was. It is a a system of mathematics associated with other systems that change over time. Now that would have been helpful to know, huh?
The most interesting part was probably when we learned about the history of the chaos theory. In this portion of the lecture Professor Jacobson discussed Poincar'e, Sharkavskii, Lorenz, and Devaney. These are all names that I had heard at one point or another. It was nice to finally be able to place a name with an important contribution to history.
The lecture also related back to the Gleick text that we had previously read and discussed. This happened nearing the end of the lecture when Professor Jacobson started to talk about the butterfly effect. It's strange to hear a theory like, "when a butterfly flaps its wings in Elmira, a tornado appears in Japan." It is not normally how we think, however, thanks to this lecture I now have a better understanding of chaos as we learnt it.
- Tia Lambert '13
I really liked the history of the Chaos Theory too. I'm a History major and it's always cool to see the connections between different subjects and fields of study.
ReplyDeleteWow, you got way more out of the lecture than I did.
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