The Birth of Chaos

The word chaos has become firmly embedded in the literature on dynamical systems. Indeed, James Gleick’s book, Chaos Theory [17], established that term as a description of the entire subject in the public mind. Nonetheless, there is no authoritative technical meaning of “chaos” in dynamical systems. Li and Yorke first used the word in the title of their paper “Period three implies chaos” [31], but it does not appear in the text.