Taking a class on non-linear dynamics introduced me to logistic maps, a section I would have happily skipped if I were reading the topic on my own. I had read about universality in Gleick'a book and had also made an attempt to read Feigenbaum's 1979 paper but I think I didn't understand it properly. It is only yesterday while re-reading Lorenz's paper when I put two and two together. And now I'm all the more happy because it turns out that the system I am working on (non-linear kinetic model for cyclohexane oxidation) has a unimodal Lorenz map and hence 4.699 (Feigenbaum's constant) is lurking in there somewhere. I hope to encounter it sometime in the near future and think it would be nice to say hello and have a chat. I scarcely imagine it to be of any importance to a manufacturer of nylon or adipic acid but whoever said the good things in life were utilitarian?
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