This review focusses on the contributions of plasma physics to chaos and nonlinear dynamics bringing new methods which are or can be used in other scientific domains. It starts with the development of the theory of Hamiltonian chaos, and then deals with order or quasi order, for instance adiabatic and soliton theories. It ends with a shorter account of dissipative and high dimensional Hamiltonian dynamics, and of quantum chaos. Most of these contributions are a spin-off of the research on thermonuclear fusion by magnetic confinement, which started in the fifties. Their presentation is both exhaustive and compact.