ABSTRACT
The introduction of geometrical and pictorial images is particularly important when it comes to psychology and sociology, for it opens up new ways of thinking that are not always possible when one deals with nature in purely abstract and numerical ways. A significant characteristic of nonlinear and chaotic dynamics is that, although the underlying theory can be treated in a purely formal way, using abstract equations, it lends itself to an easily visualizable expression in terms of the movement of a system through a landscape of valleys, hills, mountain ridges, saddles, and so on. Chaos theory is itself a branch of more general fields of study that include nonlinear dynamics and general systems theory. Chaos theory is something of a misnomer for it is not so much the study of systems in which all order has broken down in favor of pure chance but rather of those that exhibit extremely high degrees of order involving very subtle and sensitive behavior.
