We hear a lot about dynamical systems theory these days-"chaos dy namics" is the popular idiom-but very little of this abstract discipline is taught in undergraduate or even in graduate school, unless that happens to be one's own field. People may have heard some of the terms, but they may not understand what a dynamicist does. Just what does a dynamicist do? Although I've been through the training, I spend much more time talk ing and thinking about dynamics than actually doing it, which is a circum stance that affords me an interesting perspective. Some time after defending my dissertation,...

We hear a lot about dynamical systems theory these days-"chaos dy namics" is the popular idiom-but very little of this abstract discipline is taught in undergraduate or even in graduate school, unless that happens to be one's own field. People may have heard some of the terms, but they may not understand what a dynamicist does. Just what does a dynamicist do? Although I've been through the training, I spend much more time talk ing and thinking about dynamics than actually doing it, which is a circum stance that affords me an interesting perspective. Some time after defending my dissertation,...