Celestial Encounters is for anyone who has ever wondered about the foundations of chaos. In 1888, the 34-year-old Henri Poincare submitted a paper that was to change the course of science, but not before it underwent significant changes itself. "The Three-Body Problem and the Equations of Dynamics" won a prize sponsored by King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway and the journal Acta Mathematica, but after accepting the prize, Poincare found a serious mistake in his work. While correcting it, he discovered the phenomenon of chaos.

Starting with the story of...

For centuries, astronomers have been interested in the motions of the planets and in methods to calculate their orbits. Since Newton, mathematicians have been fascinated by the related N-body problem. They seek to find solutions to the equations of motion for N masspoints interacting with an inverse-square-law force and to determine whether there are quasi-periodic orbits or not. Attempts to answer such questions have led to the techniques of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. In this book, a classic work of modern applied mathematics, Jurgen Moser presents a succinct account of two...