Bertrand Russell's hardest books are written in symbols almost no one uses now. Three of them, read three different ways, and the thinkers who broke and rebuilt his work show what a reader keeps once the notation is gone.

Hermann Haken built a mathematics of self-organization out of laser physics, and it works. It also expanded into psychology, medicine, and city planning, and a Nobel laureate said in print that the whole field had no theory underneath it. Nobody ever really answered him. This magazine runs on Haken's idea anyway, so here is the case against it first.