Chaos: A Very Short Introduction by Leonard Smith, OUP. Paperback ISBN 9780192853783, £6.99.
The mission statement of OUP’s Very Short Introductions series says they "are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject". The volume titled Chaos deals with the mathematical and physical concepts behind those phenomena where small differences in the present state May have huge consequences in a future state.
I tried hard. Leonard Smith says that the 180-page booklet contains "no equations more complicated than X = 2". This is perhaps the book’s biggest weakness. I would have preferred some formalisms, and definitely a site from which one could download some models to run in simple spreadsheets. That would have helped.
Until I reached page 40, the text was amusing if not always very clear. After that, I think any interested layman with no mathematics background would certainly be lost. I kept going until page 60, at which point I became frustrated: the need to implement and observe working models of the book’s examples soon became overwhelming. How many readers will have the skill and patience to write such models? And would that not defeat the idea of the concept of "a very short introduction"?
I do not doubt the author’s competence in the field; mine is nil. The book gave me a set of more precise notions about what chaos is and what its governing aspects are; that alone was worth the considerable effort. Moreover, it is well-illustrated throughout and the glossary is good. But the book is an effort to read. Smith himself points out that it is difficult to define "a biology of non-elephants". Chaos comes in all the diversity of non-linear systems, and that makes the task of writing an introduction all but impossible. The result: many of the explanations are "chewy", making it difficult to recommend this little book to friends.
Robert Caillau, Prévessin, France.