There are books that are fun to read and that’s that. There are books that make you think, and that’s that. But then there are books the make you think and suddenly that’s no longer that, but something entirely different and presto the world is a new place. This is that book for me. Chaos, Making a New Science by James Gleick.

It helped me build models to forecast sales because I began to see natural patterns. It introduced me to fractals and self-similarity. It helped me understand the need for redundancy to capture errors through the work of Benoit Madelbrot at AT&T. I discovered laminar flow and the mysteries of the onset of turbulence and I applied it to all manner of processes. And for fun there’s the Koch curve an infinitely lone line in a finite space, and that’s cool.

I first read the book when it was published in 1987. It’s an excellent work for the layperson because it takes extraordinarily complex ideas and lays them out in a manner that is extraordinarily easy to understand. Even as I write this it makes me want to go back and re-read the work and refresh all those ideas banging around in my brain.