On Oct 24, 11:36 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Al wrote:
When you say 'Chaos Theory' , you mean classical Chaos Theory as
discovered by
Henri Poincaré at the end of the 19th century?
(Mathematicians working on non linear problems knew of Chaos Theory
ever since Poincaré, its just that it did not get popularized until
the last 25 or 30 years.)
I am sure Asimov was aware of Poincaré.

I didn't realize it went that far back, and just remember what a splash
it made when they started realizing weather worked like that.
"

Pat

Actually Chaos theory did not have that name until recently, I am
pretty sure.
Even tho Jacques Hadamard kind of discovered it in 1898, it was really
Poincaré who
nailed it in winning the prize for the the study of the three body
problem. In fact he was a bit surprised by what is called
'deterministic chaos' now, that he kind of recoiled from it.
But he did write about it in popular essays:
Poincaré, H. (1913) Mathematics and Science: Last Essays, Dover 1963
(translated from Dernières Pensées posthumously published by Ernest
Flammarion, 1913)
I would bet that a young Asimov read this.

As for PsychoHistory would also bet he bounced this off John W
Campbell who primed the pump on many of his writers all this days as
editor of Astounding/Analog,but especially in the late 30's....
throughout the 40's. Campbell was Asimov's mentor in those days and I
can just see the two bouncing ideas about Foundation off one another.
(Asimov broke with Campbell over ol wack-o L Ron Hubbard, among other
things.)
Foundation is still a ripping yarn, mainly because it has all the
trapping of a mystery story, which Asimov so loved.... in later
years.. alas when he returned to the series,well just didn't work, at
least for me.
He should have left it alone.