be creativity, and creativity — the emergence of something new — necessarily involves time.

Uncertainty
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But is mathematics, in the narrower sense of established results, really entirely timeless? Perhaps. But there is at least one small part of it — deterministic chaos — that seems to be trying to break free and take up residence in natural time. The phenomenon was discovered by Henri Poincar[é]{} at the beginning of the twentieth century as he attempted to solve the Newtonian three-body problem. An equation that exhibits deterministic chaotic dynamics can, up to a point, be treated as a timeless structure and its properties investigated using standard mathematical techniques (some invented by Poincar[é]{} for this purpose). It has been shown, for example, that the attractor is a fractal object, and therefore infinitely complicated. As a consequence the solution trajectory cannot be written explicitly. It can, however, be calculated numerically — but only up to a point: since the attractor, as a fractal, is infinitely complex, we can never know exactly where the system is on it, and hence cannot predict the future states of the system.

Take one of the simplest possible cases, the difference equation version of the logistic function: 