Book Smart

Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (World Scientific Publishing, September 2005) with CD-ROM

Robin Chapman, professor emerita of communicative disorders and psychology; and Julien Clinton Sprott, professor of physics

In the scientific world, “chaos” doesn’t just describe the kitchen.

Rather, chaos is a decades-old discipline dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of nonlinear change in time and discovering the underlying order in apparently random occurrences. Chapman and Sprott’s new coffee table book on the subject renders the sometimes-inscrutable complexities of chaos theory into art, poetry and mathematical definitions.

“Small events can have disproportionately large effects,” says Sprott, better known as “Clint” and for his “Wonders of Physics” demonstrations. “For example, when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and sets off a tornado in Wisconsin, or when police tickets for subway graffiti lead to reductions in the overall crime rate, or when infants start tracking their parent’s gaze and a burst of word learning results.”

That last example is Chapman’s bailiwick. An expert in language development, she has served as principal investigator in a number of seminal studies conducted at UW–Madison’s Waisman Center. Perhaps not surprisingly, since she is a language specialist, she also is a poet of national renown.

Sprott, meanwhile, has contributed 130 color images from four-dimensional (color in addition to the usual height, width and depth) mappings of three basic equations producing mathematical fractuals (geometrical objects containing miniature copies of themselves). He even wrote a special computer program to evaluate millions of versions in terms of which would best please the human eye.

“I didn’t set out to produce computer art. Rather, I was interested in the scientific question of how likely it is for an equation chosen at random from the infinity of possibilities to have a chaotic solution,” he says. “In exploring millions of equations by computer, I found thousands of examples of chaos, each one producing a different eye-catching pattern. There are mathematical quantities that correlate strongly with their aesthetic qualities. That means that you can train a computer to not only produce but critique its own art.”

Ninety Chapman poems will appear in “Images.”

The ultimate hope for the book, she says, is that nontraditional representations of chaos theory will help acquaint general readers with key concepts, and show readers well versed in science other ways of understanding.

“We want to help our readers discover and develop in multiple ways their own intuitions about nonlinear change. We also want to show that small acts on an individual’s part can have large and sometimes irreversible consequences,” she says.

The authors will give a reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival in October, as well as at more events later in the year. Check the Wisconsin Week calendar for details.

— Barbara Wolff