His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.ġ987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the 'Fast Forward' column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. Department of Justice and the European Commission. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.Īmong the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.īorn in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. QPBC alternate.James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. But they're loaded dice.'' Chaos is deep, even frightening in its holistic embrace of nature as paradoxically complex, wildly disorderly, random and yet stable in its infinite stream of ``self-similarities.'' A ground-breaking book about what seems to be the future of physics. Gleick traces the ideas of these little-known pioneersincluding Mitchell Feigenbaum and his Butterfly Effect Benoit Mandelbrot, whose ``fractal'' concept led to a new geometry of nature and Joseph Ford who countered Einstein with ``God plays dice with the universe. ''Chaos'' is what a handful of theorists steeped in math and computer know-how are calling their challengingly abstract new look at nature in terms of nonlinear dynamics. Science readers who have gone through relativity theory, quantum physics, Heisenbergian uncertainty, black holes and the world of quarks and virtual particles only to be stunned by recent Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) will welcome New York Times science writer Gleick's adventurous attempt to describe the revolutionary science of chaos.

Chaos making a new science book