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The imbalance of nature |
It models how a population of living creatures changes from one generation to the next, when there are limits to the available resources.
It is one of the simplest equations that can generate deterministic chaos – apparently random behaviour with no random cause.
The realisation that simple nonlinear equations can create very complex dynamics, and that apparent randomness may conceal hidden order. Popularly known as chaos theory, this discovery has innumerable applications throughout the sciences including the motion of the planets in the Solar System, weather forecasting, population dynamics in ecology, variable stars, earthquake modelling, and efficient trajectories for space probes.