Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems

We are living in an ever more complex world, an epoch where human actions can accordingly acquire far-reaching potentialities. Complex and adaptive dynamical systems are ubiquitous in the world surrounding us and require us to adapt to new realities and the way of dealing with them.

This primer has been developed with the aim of conveying a wide range of "commons-sense" knowledge in the field of quantitative complex system science at an introductory level, providing an entry point to this both fascinating and vitally important subject.

The approach is modular and phenomenology driven. Examples of emerging phenomena of generic importance treated in this book are:

-- The small world phenomenon in social and scale-free networks.

-- Phase transitions and self-organized criticality in adaptive systems.

-- Life at the edge of chaos and coevolutionary avalanches resulting from the unfolding of all living.

-- The concept of living dynamical systems and emotional diffusive control within cognitive system theory.

Technical course prerequisites are a basic knowledge of ordinary and partial differential equations and of statistics. Each chapter comes with exercises and suggestions for further reading - solutions to the exercises are also provided. This second edition adds a new chapter on quantifiying/measuring complexity in given systems, together with an introduction to information theory, has an expanded exercises and solutions section, and contains both revised and additional subsections.

Autorentext

Prof. Claudius Gros holds a chair in theoretical physics at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. After completing a PhD in theoretical condensed-matter physics in 1988 at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, Prof. Gros went as Chester-Davies fellow to Indiana University, US, before returning to Germany. His present research interests include Cognitive System Theory and Solid State Physics, with emphasis on high-temperature superconductors.

Klappentext

Discover a wide range of findings in quantitative complex system science that help us make sense of our complex world. Written at an introductory level, the book provides an accessible entry into this fascinating and vitally important subject.

Inhalt

About this book.- Graph Theory and Small-World Networks.- Chaos, Bifurcations and Diffusion.- Random Boolean Networks.- Cellular Automata and Self-Organized Criticality.- Statistical Modeling of Darwinian Evolution.- Synchronization Phenomena.- Elements of Cognitive System Theory.- Solutions.- Index.