<DIV>In 1978 Dr. Spencer Brownfield saved New York City from itself, bringing the city back from the verge of collapse and ruin. And for 30 years, his small, minute, and unnoticed adjustments to the city’s systems have, à la <I>The Butterfly Effect,</I> kept the city afloat. Or so he claims to Heller Wilson, a young graduate student that Dr. Brownfield has chosen as his successor. But are Dr. Brownfield’s claims about "complexity math" and its application to the city’s patterns of life real, or are they the ravings of a man broken by the death of his wife and daughter, desperate to find some kind of control over the world around him? <I>Strange Attractors</I> is about control — what you can control in your life and what you can’t, and how important it is to recognize the difference.<BR></DIV>