Xn= kXn-1(1-Xn-1)

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It's interesting how things just sometimes go "click". I was perusing the net reading about various topics on software development and business management and stumbled across an interesting paper discussing disaster response (I think it's actually referred to on the agile wikipedia entry) What Disaster Response Management Can Learn From Chaos Theory


This paper goes into some depth explaining how nonlinear functions can be used to analyze disaster response. I got increasingly interested as I realized that, in some ways, information technology has parallels to disaster response. More importantly, nonlinear math has a huge potential to help analyze and solve many information technology problems.


I did a little more research and stumbled upon this gem and began reading it:

Organizations and Chaos: Defining the Methods of Nonlinear Management
Book by H. Richard Priesmeyer; Quorum Books, 1992. 258 pgs.

This is written by the same person who did the disaster response paper and is a compelling read. The reason it's so interesting to me is that these problems have exact correlations to many problems I see with software development. For now, I'm going to finish this book and I'll follow up later with some 3/4 baked ideas.

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