Two reasons why you probably had to study those: 1. Chaos Theory was all the rage in the 80s. My dynamical systems prof said “you couldn’t go to a cocktail par

Two reasons why you probably had to study those: 1. Chaos Theory was all the rage in the 80s. My dynamical systems prof said “you couldn’t go to a cocktail party without talking about it.” Clearly I’ve been going to the wrong cocktail parties. That’s also why you see it pop up in fictional works like Jurassic Park from that era. 2. Chaos gives rise to all sorts of chemistry relevant phenomena that can be modeled via statistical mechanics. The most obvious is thermodynamics but that’s because I’m not a chemist. I know people study chemical reactions from a stat mech perspective, and a lot of people doing stat mech are in the chemistry department. How you get the randomness in stat mech is by approximating a high-dimensional chaotic system with a low-dimensional one to render a problem tractable. In doing so, you lose the Markov property of the dynamics (your rates of change don’t just depend on the current state of the system but all previous states). Non-Markovian systems are very complicated, so the non-Markovian part of the dynamics gets replaced by random noise.