“Chaos theory” is a nonspecialist,

“Chaos theory” is a nonspecialist, catchall term that we use to cover the study of chaotic behaviors in a variety of disciplines—biology, chemistry, economics, and so forth. I focus on chaos theory as practiced within physics, wherein it occupies a particular subdiscipline called “dynamical systems theory.”Although “dynamical systems theory” more accurately designates the scientific modeling I hereafter describe, I nevertheless use “chaos theory” to acknowledge the phrase’s greater cultural resonance.