{"id":144606,"date":"2022-08-22T21:23:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T02:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/how-mathematicians-make-sense-of-chaos"},"modified":"2022-08-22T21:23:35","modified_gmt":"2022-08-23T02:23:35","slug":"how-mathematicians-make-sense-of-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/how-mathematicians-make-sense-of-chaos","title":{"rendered":"How Mathematicians Make Sense of Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-mathematicians-make-sense-of-chaos2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 1,885, King Oscar II of Sweden announced a public challenge consisting of four mathematical problems. The French polymath Henri Poincar\u00e9 focused on one related to the motion of celestial bodies, the so-called <em>n<\/em>-body problem. Will our solar system continue its clocklike motion indefinitely, will the planets fly off into the void, or will they collapse into a fiery solar death?<\/p>\n<p>Poincar\u00e9\u2019s solution \u2014 which indicated that at least some systems, like the sun, Earth and moon, were stable \u2014 won the prestigious prize, and an accompanying article was printed for distribution in 1889. Unfortunately, his solution was incorrect.<\/p>\n<p>Poincar\u00e9 admitted his error and paid to have the copies of his solution destroyed (which cost more than the prize money). A month later, he submitted a corrected version. He now saw that even a system with only three bodies could behave too unpredictably \u2014 too chaotically \u2014 to be modeled. So began the field of dynamical systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1,885, King Oscar II of Sweden announced a public challenge consisting of four mathematical problems. The French polymath Henri Poincar\u00e9 focused on one related to the motion of celestial bodies, the so-called n-body problem. Will our solar system continue its clocklike motion indefinitely, will the planets fly off into the void, or will they [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}