It's that point when a smooth river turns into a tumultuous swirl of white water, the tornado that
unpredictably changes course on a dime or the wild interactions of three planets under one another's gravitational pull .
It's chaos.
Although most people instinctively know chaos when they see it, there hasn't been one, single, universally agreed-upon mathematical definition
of the term. Now, scientists have tried to come up with a mathematical way to describe
such chaotic systems.
The new definition, which was described in a paper published in July in the journal Chaos, could help identify seemingly smooth situations where the potential for chaos lurks, said study co-author Brian Hunt, a mathematician at the
University of Maryland, College Park.
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