Introduction

Recently we (Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Alex Altair) started a project investigating chaos theory as an example of field formation.[1] The number one question you get when you tell people you are studying the history of chaos theory is “does that matter in any way?”[2]. Books and articles will list applications, but the same few seem to come up a lot, and when you dig in, application often means “wrote some papers about it” rather than “achieved commercial success”.

In this post we checked a few commonly cited applications to see if they pan out. We didn’t do deep dives to prove the mathematical dependencies, just sanity checks.

Our findings: Big Chaos has a very good PR team, but the hype isn’t unmerited either. Most of the commonly touted applications never received wide usage, but chaos was at least instrumental in several important applications [...]

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Outline:

(00:04) Introduction

(01:17) Applications

(01:20) Cryptography and random number generators- Strong No (Alex)

(03:17) Anesthesia, Fetal Monitoring, and Approximate Entropy- No (Elizabeth)

(04:43) Empirical Dynamical Modeling– Unproven (Elizabeth)

(06:29) Weather forecasting- Yes (Alex)

(12:14) Fractals- Yes (Elizabeth)

(13:14) Final thoughts

(14:27) Acknowledgements

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.