7 February 2011 - catastrophe theory

As countries in the Middle East and North Africa poise on the brink, perhaps to be nudged one way or the other by a butterfly flapping its wings and thus exemplifying the butterfly catastrophe of mathematical catastrophe theory, we may well wonder how many of these artificially hodge-podged countries will end up breaking into pieces, since after all catastrophe theory is only a branch of bifurcation theory.