{"id":71,"date":"2015-06-14T16:58:02","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T16:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=71"},"modified":"2015-06-14T16:58:02","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T16:58:02","slug":"mathematics-in-classic-literature-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"Mathematics in Classic Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to Wikipedia, \u201cThe idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events made its earliest known appearance in <em>A Sound of Thunder<\/em>, a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel.\u201d\u00a0 The Wikipedia article also states that \u201cchaos theory and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions were described in the literature in a particular case of the three-body problem by Henri Poincar\u00e9 in 1890.\u201d\u00a0 And yet, here in <em>The Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, published in 1880, I found, \u201cfor all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.\u201d\u00a0 Dostoyevsky\u2019s quote came from the mouth of a Russian Orthodox monk in the midst of a long religious section.\u00a0 I wonder how many other readers recognized the similarity to the Butterfly Effect?\u00a0 Come to think of it, there are three brothers Karamazov, and the entire novel has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions and is headed toward chaos, or maybe catastrophe, but that is yet another mathematical subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Wikipedia, \u201cThe idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events made its earliest known appearance in A Sound of Thunder, a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel.\u201d\u00a0 The Wikipedia article also states that \u201cchaos theory and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}