I am happy to see that these topics are of some interst

For the theory of chaos I would suggest the book :

"The computational beauty of nature " by Gary William Flake

It should be of particular interest for programmers

For the "n bodies problem" I can not be of help
I own the 25 books series "Mondo matematico " ( Mathematical world ) but it must be an Italian edition only
Please note however that this topic needs the knowledge of extremely advanced maths
I dont have myself the slightest idea how Poincarè achieved the results which I explained in my previous post

I would like just to add something more about this topic

Common sense assumes that a deterministic process must be , in principle, also predictable
It is not
A reason is the one explained by Error 014
An other reason is the n body problem itself

Why could Newton discover the gravitational laws ?
Because the 2 bodies Sun -Earth system entails a periodical orbit
Suppose that our earth belongs to a n bodies system
Actually it does but the influence of the other planets is negligible

The path of our earth in a time interval T , would be different than the one in the previous and in the next time interval T , regardless of T duration
In such a case It would be impossible to find out the laws of motion even though they are exactly the same as in a 2 body system

This was the shock caused by Poincare's analysis of the n body problem

I suppose this answer Joozey's questio

He said, I made a computer simulation
I can predict the configuration of 200 bodies why does wikipedia claim that it is not possible ?

Aside from the other consideration,which are correct ,the answer is
Because you know the law of motion that you have set
An observer watching your simulation could not predict the future even using the most sophisticated mathematical tools



Last edited by AlbertoT; 12/23/11 14:00.