Chaos

What Is Chaos?

Chaos is apparently unpredictable behavior arising in a deterministic system because of great sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos arises in a dynamical system if two arbitrarily close starting points diverge exponentially, so that their future behavior is eventually unpredictable.

Weather is considered chaotic since arbitrarily small variations in initial conditions can result in radically different weather later. This may limit the possibilities of long-term weather forecasting. (The canonical example is the possibility of a butterfly's sneeze affecting the weather enough to cause a hurricane weeks later.)

Devaney defines a function as chaotic if it has sensitive dependence on initial conditions, it is topologically transitive, and periodic points are dense. In other words, it is unpredictable, indecomposable, and yet contains regularity.

Allgood and Yorke define chaos as a trajectory that is exponentially unstable and neither periodic or asymptotically periodic. That is, it oscillates irregularly without settling down.