Robert May was one of the early investigators of the phenomenon of chaos in iterated systems. That work is related to the butterfly-shaped Lorenz Attractor, an

Robert May was one of the early investigators of the phenomenon of chaos in iterated systems. That work is related to the butterfly-shaped Lorenz Attractor, and to the Mandlebrot Set. Perhaps a good place to start to explore some of these things is the Logistic map[0], first popularised in 1976 in a paper by Robert May. It's the investigation of this iterative equation: x_{n+1} = r * x_{n} * ( 1 - x_{n} ) Different values of r can lead to wildly differing behaviours, including the onset of chaos. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map