ABSTRACT

Devaney, Robert L. It has been said that the three great developments in twentieth century science are relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. That strikes me the same as saying that the three great developments in twentieth century engineering are the airplane, the computer, and the pop-top aluminum can. Chaos and fractals are not even twentieth century ideas: chaos was first observed by Poincare´ and fractals were familiar to Cantor a century ago, although neither man had the computer at his disposal to show the rest of the world the beauty he was seeing.